Critical transitions in chronic disease: transferring concepts from ecology to systems medicine.

Ecosystems and biological systems are known to be inherently complex and to exhibit nonlinear dynamics. Diseases such as microbiome dysregulation or depression can be seen as complex systems as well and were shown to exhibit patterns of nonlinearity in their response to perturbations. These nonlinearities can be revealed by a sudden shift in system states, for instance from health to disease. The identification and characterization of early warning signals which could predict upcoming critical transitions is of primordial interest as prevention of disease onset is a major aim in health care. In this review, we focus on recent evidence for critical transitions in diseases and discuss the potential of such studies for therapeutic applications.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  Current Opinion in Biotechnology

• Publication date

  2015-08-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.copbio.2014.11.020PMID 25498477
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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