Statistical Power and Sample Size in Personalized Medicine

Personalized medicine (PM) is a rapidly growing field of healthcare and medicine. The advantage of a personalized medicine is the availability of each person’s unique genetic and genomic print. The healthcare that incorporates personalized medicine provides coordinated, continuous patient-specific data. The goal of personalized medicine is to promote health wellness, satisfaction, and to increase the likelihood of a successful disease prevention, detection and treatment. This form of medicine, apart from patient’s personal data and medicine-biological measurements, uses genomic information data to understand the molecular structure of the disease and to optimize health care strategies and drug therapies. Clinical trials that investigate personalized approaches are subject to special rules, for example, pertain the selection of participating patients. In personalized medicine, a certain genetic profile must be identified so that the treatment can work. This is why potential participants are first screened and selected accordingly for clinical trials. The special design of such clinical trials has an impact on the evaluation of data collected during the given study.