Genetic Mapping

[clunk]

Anybody done this?

From 23andme.com:

"We bring the world of genetics to you.

Receive 60+ personalized genetic reports
Understand what your DNA says about your health, traits and ancestry
Access interactive tools to share, compare and discover more with friends and family"

No affiliation with the site, just curious as to what folks think about it.

[mmoore]

I was listening to CBC radio discussion on these types of tests and if there was any way that 'now you know' that you could disqualify yourself for life insurance. an interesting twist to something that could be quite neat to know but dangerous knowing. its not like a palm reading or something.

[theflashunc]

I would steer clear. Certainly read enough criticism about them the last few years that gives me pause:

23andMe Is Terrifying, but Not for the Reasons the FDA Thinks - Scientific American

[sk_tle]

It is something that I don't have interest in. I like life to be unpredictable. But then sometimes I feel like a caveman. People tend to look at us with strange eyes when we tell them we didn't want to know the gender of our kids before their actual birth and the midwifes said it was now a rare event.

[joosttx]

My Dad did this. It reveal he came from an Neanderthal ancestry. This explained a lot. It would of been even more funny if I were not his son....

[vertical_doug]

If you do it, you may want to upload your data to a real scientific study being conducted by NYGenome and Columbia University. DNA.LAND

They have a discussion area on consent and why it is important. (goto FAQ and check out consent doc.)

Although there is some hard science behind 23&me, I tend to think there is a lot of hype and fluff in what they pretend to know.

[11.4]

My work for thirty years involved developing the technology of genetic sequencing and mapping. And since then up to the present I've been working on legal, insurance, and healthcare ramifications of the technology that's available, including a huge study going on in China.

First, you technically can have a privately paid for genetic study done and not have to disclose the results for insurance purposes. However, if the facts do come out in any way, you can then be denied coverage. This is an area that insurers are demanding information access on, so what protects you now may not protect you later. For that reason, I'd be skeptical about a blanket test.

Second, if you run one of these tests you are finding out about a hodgepodge of issues with not a lot of coherence -- just a collection of tests that are easy and cheap to do. A few are interesting, only a few allow you to actually address a problem, and some are results for issues that haven't even been characterized fully yet anyway. And there are not a lot of diseases for which genetic tests are available but for which more effective biochemical tests are not -- so you can get a basic lab test and find out much of the same info.

In the testing environment of the mass testing companies, there is still a fair error rate. Everyone thinks that DNA testing is 100%, but the methodologies are anything but. They are easily 95%, but if you get a positive it still has a +/- 5% chance of being erroneous, and then you want to get it retested and do clinical testing, all of which means it's on your insurance record even if it turns out to be negative after re-testing.

If you have a significant issue or risk of an issue (familial breast cancer, as a case in point), you can get specific testing, or specific testing will be available in the next couple years or so. Those are the ones to focus on. Do you have a parent with a heritable cancer, or familial Alzheimers, or Huntington's Chorea, or Friedreich ataxia? You can get tests for those, though if you discover you're positive you don't really have anything you can do about it except choose how you want to live the next few years of your life.

In short, I wouldn't recommend doing a broad spectrum test. Public policy is in flux and privacy laws now may not exist in the same form later, after insurers have had their say. And the broad spectrum tests cover a lot of what is basically useless. If you have a specific issue, target it, either with genetic testing or clinical labs. I'm not arguing for or against an "ignorance is bliss" or "knowing is good" point of view. This is solely about what's useful in the tests and what the ramifications are, if not now, then ten years down the road.

[MarkC]

Useless as a health tool for the individual. Entertainment for ancestry. If you have a real medical query consult a proper professional through your physician.