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Seriously, why? Many people have embraced direct-to-consumer (DTC) genotyping, or whole genome sequencing, for reasons that we admit we don't understand. But we are clearly missing something. Do people believe that as a general statement future disease is truly predictable from their genome? We think that most geneticists at least, would say not.
Just to be clear, here we're referring to diseases the person doesn't yet have. If one already has some disease, the usefulness, if any, of genome testing would be those instances where specific causal variants are known to respond to specific kinds of treatment. This, however, is only a small minority of cases, in which the causal variants have relatively clear, strong, and consistent effect. If this isn't the case, why do people do it? In today's post we lay out our view, hoping it might elicit insights from people who see it differently.
Disease risk prediction
We'll start with GWAS (genomewide association studies), the most common method these days for looking for causal genes. A few recent exchanges on Twitter make it obvious that what people...
Just to be clear, here we're referring to diseases the person doesn't yet have. If one already has some disease, the usefulness, if any, of genome testing would be those instances where specific causal variants are known to respond to specific kinds of treatment. This, however, is only a small minority of cases, in which the causal variants have relatively clear, strong, and consistent effect. If this isn't the case, why do people do it? In today's post we lay out our view, hoping it might elicit insights from people who see it differently.
Disease risk prediction
We'll start with GWAS (genomewide association studies), the most common method these days for looking for causal genes. A few recent exchanges on Twitter make it obvious that what people...