Advancing Precision Medicine Beyond 'Asian' Race

Abstract

Advances in precision medicine afford a unique opportunity to develop personalized disease prevention, treatment, and interventions. However, the use of race and ethnicity persists as a measure of innate biological differences for individuals of Asian descent in clinical decision-making, with race-specific body mass index cutoffs the most well-known example. We posit that precision medicine must move beyond using “Asian” race as a risk factor while acknowledging the socio-political construction and impact of Asian race and ethnicity on health outcomes. We recommend continued development of holistic health data to comprehensively encompass the genetic, environmental, and social variables that Asian race and ethnicity has been used to proxy.