How does evolutionary thinking change medicine?

2023-03-02

Evolutionary medicine can change the view of biomedicine and public health. Photo source: The word "evolution" in Frontier of Science seems to appear only when talking about the long history, but in fact, it affects people's health every day. For example, the evolution of antibiotic resistance is actually an issue of evolution, and the increase of modern health problems such as obesity can also be traced to the principle of evolution. An article published in the latest issue of Science Frontier shows people how to apply the evolutionary perspective to medicine to treat diseases. Dr. Barbara Natson Horowitz, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, pointed out that evolutionary medicine is expected to change people's understanding of the root causes of illness and enhance people's ability to protect health. Daniel Bloomstein of UCLA said that today's goal is to promote biomedical innovation and make public health measures more effective, covering all fields from infectious diseases, epidemics to cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Overcoming chemotherapy and antibiotic resistance is an urgent global health threat. As bacteria and cancer cells naturally adapt to drug treatment, new drug resistant variants continue to emerge. At present, we can only solve this problem by producing new antibiotics and developing cancer therapies, but these are temporary and expensive solutions. Evolutionary strategies can break this cycle. For example, "anti-evolution" drugs can prevent bacteria from sharing drug resistance genes with each other, and "anti-antibiotic" is another innovative strategy. In hospitals, when the antibiotics given to blood contact with harmless bacteria in the intestine, antibiotic resistance infection usually occurs, leading to the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistant strains. The oral "antibiotic" that blocks these drugs in the intestine can prevent this situation. In the case of cancer, the evolutionary branch called "extinction therapy" can help solve the problem of chemotherapy resistance. Brumstein explained: "The effective way to eliminate a population is to reduce its size through ecological disasters, just like a meteor hitting a dinosaur, and then kill the remaining people with the second disaster, just like the famine after the meteor." "Extinction therapy" converts this principle into a clinical strategy. The patient first received a high dose of an anticancer drug to reduce the size of the tumor. But before there is a chance of drug resistance, the first treatment will be replaced by another one to kill the remaining cancer cells. In using biodiversity to promote innovation in natural biodiversity, many evolution-related therapeutic strategies may be hidden in full view of the public. "The blood pressure of giraffes is the highest among all animals, but they will not suffer from high blood pressure damage, and elephants and Tasmanians rarely get cancer." Horowitz said, "What is the biological principle of protecting these animals from human incurable diseases? People have not fully understood and utilized the mystery". Brumstein called for systematic mapping of disease vulnerability and resistance mechanisms in nature, and the creation of such a database can help people identify its unique characteristics within 10 years, and ultimately lead to new clinical treatment methods. The evolution principle of improving public health measures can also guide more effective

Edit:Ying Ying    Responsible editor:Jia Jia

Source:digitalpaper.stdaily.com

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