Navigenics, 23andMe and deCODE specify that customers own their personal data. But executives keep the door open to use their growing databases for research with commercial or nonprofit partners. Such studies should take place under research protocols, not as an outgrowth of consumer marketing, the CDC’s Khoury argues. For now, he says, the best tool available to personalize medicine is low tech and low cost: family health history. It captures the effects of multiple genes, shared environment and common behavior. But less than one third of the population has actively collected such information. Genotyping is a wonderful research technology, Khoury remarks, but “it’s going to take a long time to translate gene discovery into action.”
Editor's Note: This story was originally printed with the title "Taking Genomes Personally"
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4 Comments
Add CommentDo not waste you hard-earned money on gene testing. I just finished reading J. Craig Venter's "A Life Decoded". Buy the book, read it, and save $975.00.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes. It appears as though there are too many genetic and environmental variables to predict, with reasonable medical certainty, whether information one recieves from personal genome scans can be helpful. My cousin had her breasts preemptively removed due to the fear instilled by knowledge of genetic markers and family history, however, she had no cancer cells at the time of her decision to go forward with the radical procedure.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow tragic! My wife's aunt had a tonsillectomy in the 1930s, (when that was the thing to do then), and subsequently died from improperly administered anesthesia. She was in her early twenties. Sometimes elective surgery can be a bad thing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConsidering that a harmful mutation of BRAC1 or BRAC2 is 60% likely to cause breast or ovarian cancer in a woman, and that such cancers do not have a good early detection or survival rate; preemptive surgery may present a lower risk to the woman. Family history, personal history, and physical examination must accompany the genetic testing in determining that risk.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn medicine, there is never such a thing as a sure thing; except that we will all eventually die.
Tom Mitchell's cousin may have doubled her life expectancy by having the mastectomy. If she HAD had cancer cells present, then it wouldn't have been preemptive surgery.
Hugh Jones' wife's aunt's death during a tonsillectomy in the 1930s isn't surprising or unusual. Most anesthesiologists didn't have much of an idea of what they were doing back then, being barely better than stone knives and bearskins as Doctor McCoy was fond of saying. Today's anesthesiologists are several orders of magnitude more knowledgeable than they were in the '30s; and 5 to 10 times safer than they were even as little as 10 years ago.