Systems health, a transition from disease management towards health promotion

To date, most of the chronic diseases, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes are the leading cause of death. Current strategies towards disease treatment, i.e., risk prediction and target therapy, still have limitations for precision medicine due to the dynamic and complex nature of health. Interactions among genetics, lifestyle, and surrounding environments have functional effects on disease evolution and cannot be ignored. Thus there is an urgent demand for a transition in health care area in order to address the hysteresis of diagnosis and stabilize the increasing health care costs. In this chapter, we explore new insights in the field of health promotion and also introduced the integration of systems theories with health science and clinical practice. On the basis of systems biology and systems medicine, a novel concept called ’Systems Health’ was comprehensively advocated. Two kinds of bioinformatics models, i.e., Casual Loop Diagram and quantitative model, were selected as examples for the further illumination. The translational applications of these models in systems health were sequentially discussed. Moreover, we highlighted the bridging of ancient and modern views towards health, and put forward a proposition for citizen science and citizen empowerment in health promotion.