Toward a medical prolepsis by chronobiology.
Medicine today strongly aims at prevention and optimization of diagnosis and therapy Studies tried staging and standardization of clinical trials in diseases and made search of markers for early diagnosis, prognosis and therapy. Moreover, risk factors and other variables such as predictors are now investigated more often in groups or populations of apparently healthy subjects, especially for such diseases as atherosclerosis and neoplasia. This new aspect of increasing interest may be defined as medical prolepsis (from the Greek pi rho ómicron lambda eta psi iota zeta = anticipated idea). It includes early signals of disease (protopathology) as well as other signals the host shows as defence or alarm reaction. Hence, we suggest a chronobiological approach in this field, which allows to quantify health and reveals more subtle differences in many physiological variables. According to these views, we reported studies concerning humoral markers and other parameters considered as risk factors both in atherosclerosis and in some endocrine tumors.