TY - JOUR T1 - Personalised medicine: are we ready? JF - European Respiratory Review JO - EUROPEAN RESPIRATORY REVIEW DO - 10.1183/16000617.0088-2017 VL - 26 IS - 145 SP - 170088 AU - Renaud Louis AU - Nicolas Roche Y1 - 2017/09/30 UR - http://err.ersjournals.com/content/26/145/170088.abstract N2 - This issue of the European Respiratory Review (ERR) contains the first article of a new series entitled “Personalised medicine in respiratory diseases”. The specific topic of this first article is personalised medicine for asthma [1], as in another recent article published in the ERR [2]. Is it really worth focusing that much on this new concept? The exponentially growing number of articles on personalised medicine in PubMed suggests that the answer is yes: there was one citation referring to “personalised medicine” in 1990, eight in 2000, 482 in 2010, and 1851 in 2016! Before going further, let us note as a preamble that the terms “personalised”, “individualised”, “precision” and “P4” (predictive, preventive, personalised and participatory; to be discussed later in this editorial) medicine are often used interchangeably (and this list is not exhaustive), although some authors have suggested differences between them. For instance, it has been proposed that “precision” refers mostly to improvements in the taxonomy of diseases and patients' stratification, and thus is more a component of personalisation than of prevention, prediction and participation [3]. To avoid this debate, we will restrict ourselves to the term “personalised medicine” here. Of note, stratified medicine is based on groups (strata) rather than individuals. Thus, it represents a step towards personalisation but is not synonymous to it. The main targets of personalised medicine are chronic noncommunicable diseases, which now represent the leading causes of death, handicap and health-related direct or indirect costs in the world [4]. The purpose of this editorial is to introduce the topic of personalised medicine, discuss how it can be illustrated in the asthma field based on the article by Chung [1], and introduce future articles of this series.A new series entitled “Personalised medicine in respiratory diseases” begins with a focus on asthma http://ow.ly/VGGE30eYTmT ER -