An article in The Journal of the American Medical Association says that advocates of personalized or “precision medicine” may have created unrealistic expectations about its promise while leaving many questions unanswered.

“Even though personalized medicine will be useful to better understand rare diseases and identify novel therapeutic targets for some conditions, the promise of improved risk prediction, behavior change, lower costs, and gains in public health for common diseases seem unrealistic,” wrote Michael J. Joyner, M.D.,  of the department of anesthesiology at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn., and Nigel Paneth, M.D., of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics,  at the College of Human Medicine, Michigan State University.

The authors say that proponents must explain how personalized medicine will  actually change healthcare and be more realistic about what the public can expect.