RS Sugandha

TL;DR: Results indicate that students had adequate awareness and perception level about awareness of Hepatitis B infection.

Abstract: Sir, As early as 1958 the German pediatrician Friedrich Vogel suspected that our genes play an important role in determining our response to drugs and proposed a name for the branch of science that investigates this phenomenon, i.e. pharmacogenetics. Pharmacogenetics is the science that underpins understanding the role that an individual’s genetic make-up plays in how well a medicine works, as well as what side effects are likely to occur, improving our ability to identify the genetic causes of diseases and search for new drug targets, while pharmacogenomics is the broader application of genomic technologies to new drug discovery and further characterization of older drugs. Pharmacogenetics refers to genetic differences in metabolic pathways which can affect individual responses to drugs, both in terms of therapeutic effect as well as adverse effects. Pharmacogenomics is a rapidly developing field that has important implications in individualized treatment for patients and its implication affect drug development issues such as drug safety, productivity, and personalized health care. Pharmacogenomics combines conventional pharmaceutical sciences such as biochemistry with annotated acquaintance of genes, proteins, and single nucleotide polymorphisms. The benefits of pharmacogenetics or pharmacogenomics includes superior safer drugs, appropriate dosage of drugs, powerful medicines, better vaccination, advance screening of drugs, and reduction in overall cost and treatment in health setup. Genetics may influence choice of medicine in several different ways. People are known to differ in the genetic variants they possess of a series of enzymes concerned with the absorption, metabolism, and excretion of medicines; these are characteristics with which a person is born. They do not necessarily influence susceptibility to disease, but rather the way the individual body processes medicines to which it is exposed. They often affect classes of medicines rather than specific individual medicines. People with particular genotypes may find some medicines ineffective, or may need higher or lower doses in order to achieve a therapeutic effect because they break the substances down either more or less rapidly. There are a large but finite number of these systems for processing medicines, and as our understanding of them advances, predictive genetic testing may be used to determine which medicines to prescribe and in what doses. The field of pharmacogenetics began with a focus on drug metabolism, but it has been extended to encompass the full spectrum of drug disposition, including a growing list of transporters lEttEr to thE Editor

TL;DR: Results indicate that students had good awareness and perception level about awareness of oral care in palliative treatment in a rural dental college located in western India.