Socialmedicinen och genetiken

Abstract

It is time to take epigenetics seriously in social medicine. Social medicine has a major challenge for the future, the differences in disease incidence and consequences between short-, medium and long basic education. It can be met by a new tool, epigenetics and its theories. The understanding of the social etiology of disease and the social consequences of disease can be fundamentally understood. It can relate to today's generation but also several generations back and forward. The journey started 6 decades ago with the ideas of multifactorial etiology. It continued with a couple of theoretical papers on the application to humans of the model experiments on mammals. One stop along the way was a concrete epidemiologic study in humans that pointed towards epigenetics. A network was formed that indicated the status of the research area. A first molecular article was published as a preprint. It provided a tantalizing glimpse of the processes behind acquired heredity.