The first disagreement I have is your statement that people can alter their genetics. My understanding (I’m definitely not a geneticist, but I do have a strong science background) is that you may be able to affect the expression of your genetics, but you can’t change what’s coded in your DNA. Perhaps that’s what you meant to type, but it’s not what actually got typed.

The second disagreement is the idea that knowing more about your risk factors is negative. For people with some personality types, it’s certainly possible that finding out that they have an increased risk of something is going to stress them so badly that it actually increases the likelihood that that disease develops. Possible, but I have to admit that I’m pretty skeptical that it’s the most likely response people will have. I totally agree with your statement that a healthy lifestyle is important, but I think the reality is that most people pick and choose which aspects of “healthy living” they’re going to focus on. Some folks (including me!) may be more likely to focus on improving specific aspects of a “healthy lifestyle” if they have stronger evidence that their behavior is putting their health/life at risk. For example… I’m adopted, and in the last few years, I made contact with and gotten to know my birth mother. I also gained access to medical history info that hadn’t been available to me previously. I was always aware that keeping active, eating healthy, etc were important, and that it was important to not become overweight. However, it became much more “real” to me when I found out that obesity and obesity related illnesses were problems in my birth family. It made me much more aware of my weight- not in an obsessive way, but as something that I really DO need to pay attention to. Did I know previously that being overweight was bad? Certainly! But now I’m more aware of the risks associated with that little upward creep in my weight.

I was diagnosed with type II adult-onset diabetes about 10 years ago. In the 10 years preceding that diagnosis, diabetes and “pre-diabetes” was simply not high on my medical risk radar — before the Internet and Wikipedia. However, had I known that I had a moderately increased risk of type II diabetes (even without knowing these statistically important proviso — what percentage of the risk is genetic in the first instance) I may have looked at my own pattern of consuming four or five soft drinks made with high fructose corn syrup and a nightly bowl of vanilla ice cream and made wiser choices. My physician provides online historical results of my cholesterol blood work in a graphic form. This kind of information has a salutary effect in involving me more acutely and intimately with my own healthcare. I believe genetic testing has a similar effect.

One thing that you did not highlight is that genetic testing done by a reputable company like 23andMe is very much like a gift that gives on giving. Their geneticists and microbiologists keep up on current literature and medical “discoveries” regarding the SNPs tested by 23 and the company provides updated reports as to what these findings mean, if anything, to their customers. Information comes out in time frames of weeks and months, not years.

Finally, even if this kind of genetic information is not meant to be of diagnostic medical value to consumers at this point, several companies have promised whole genome tests by 2013 for under $1000. I believe that getting a head start on the inevitable genomic information explosion is worth the initial confusion that the introduction of new technology always brings. I feel confident that terms like allele and SNP will become common parlance among most people in the next decade.

PS: New results today — leprosy susceptibility. Not anything to be worried or confused about, but interesting anyway.

I was diagnosed with type II adult-onset diabetes about 10 years ago. In the 10 years preceding that diagnosis, diabetes and “pre-diabetes” was simply not high on my medical risk radar — before the Internet and Wikipedia. However, had I known that I had a moderately increased risk of type II diabetes (even without knowing these statistically important proviso — what percentage of the risk is genetic in the first instance) I may have looked at my own pattern of consuming four or five soft drinks made with high fructose corn syrup and a nightly bowl of vanilla ice cream and made wiser choices. My physician provides online historical results of my cholesterol blood work in a graphic form. This kind of information has a salutary effect in involving me more acutely and intimately with my own healthcare. I believe genetic testing has a similar effect.

One thing that you did not highlight is that genetic testing done by a reputable company like 23andMe is very much like a gift that gives on giving. Their geneticists and microbiologists keep up on current literature and medical “discoveries” regarding the SNPs tested by 23 and the company provides updated reports as to what these findings mean, if anything, to their customers. Information comes out in time frames of weeks and months, not years.

Finally, even if this kind of genetic information is not meant to be of diagnostic medical value to consumers at this point, several companies have promised whole genome tests by 2013 for under $1000. I believe that getting a head start on the inevitable genomic information explosion is worth the initial confusion that the introduction of new technology always brings. I feel confident that terms like allele and SNP will become common parlance among most people in the next decade.

If you are also interested in seeing absolutely everything about genotype data, SNPedia has a pretty fantastic little tool called Promethease. It takes in data exported from 23andMe, deCODE and other services and exports a pretty comprehensive summary of all the SNPs that were genotyped and your variants. If it’s only a preliminary study or there is some debate, it talks about that as well. I actually found it far more interesting than 23andMe’s offerings.

Promethease: http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Promethease

epistasis?