Did you know that your environment affects the effectiveness of your medications and how well they work?
Even the air you breathe can affect how effective a drug is for you, according to experts.
Your genes play a major role in determining your height, hair and eye color, and skin tone, but they don’t tell the whole story. Your environment, climate, is also incredibly important in shaping your personality, your likes and dislikes, and your health.
In fact, your diet, social interactions, exposure to pollution, physical activity, and education often have a greater influence on many of your characteristics than genetics.
Understanding how your genes and environment increase your chances of developing asthma, heart disease, cancer, dementia, and other conditions can be a life-changing step.
The field of genomics has made it relatively easy to test for a wide range of genetic variations linked to disease risk, both in the hospital and at home.
But in recent years, science has been making progress in identifying the environmental factors that increase the risk of many diseases and highlighting ways to improve treatment based on your personal environmental exposures.