Human variability in susceptibility How big, how often, for what responses to what agents?

Area of Science:

• Pharmacology and Toxicology
• Epidemiology
• Genetics

Background:

• Understanding inter-individual variability in susceptibility is crucial for risk assessment and personalized medicine.
• Previous research has explored variability in response to drugs, pathogens, and carcinogens, but a unified framework for comparison is lacking.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review basic concepts and methods for estimating inter-individual variability in human susceptibility.
• To provide a scale for comparing different variability findings.
• To summarize accumulated results of variability analyses across different domains.

Main Methods:

• Review of existing literature on inter-individual variability estimation.
• Development of a comparative scale for variability findings.
• Synthesis of data using box plots to summarize variability in pharmacodynamics, infectious disease susceptibility, and carcinogenesis.

Main Results:

• Presentation of a scale for understanding and comparing variability findings.
• Summary of observed variability in pharmacodynamic effects (non-cancer).
• Data on variability in susceptibility to infectious organisms and carcinogens.

Conclusions:

• The study provides a framework for assessing and comparing human susceptibility variability.
• Variability is a significant factor in drug response, infectious disease, and cancer risk.
• Further research can utilize the presented scale and summarized data for enhanced risk assessment.