Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FDA Authorizes Ten 23andme Genetic Health Risk Reports

blog.23andme.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 195 posts

Re: FDA Authorizes Ten 23andme Genetic Health Risk Reports

#141

Post by lotharbot »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #112
problems wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd much rather that kind of thing be available as clicking a button personally. Getting information that could help you make big decisions is very useful.

What sort of big decisions does knowing you have Huntington's disease help you make? It's a debilitating disease with no treatment or any way to prevent it.

Knowing about a chronic, untreatable, future illness can help you decide whether or not to have children, and if so, whether to have them earlier than you might otherwise have planned. Likewise it can influence you to accelerate the pace of other life plans (like traveling, or setting up a nonprofit in your neighborhood) and scrap other lower-priority plans.

Re: FDA Authorizes Ten 23andme Genetic Health Risk Reports

#142

Post by oceanghost »

butisaidsudo wrote: post #4

> For several years, 23andMe has worked on demonstrating that its reports are easy to understand and analytically valid... I guess these are different reports, but I know a genetic counsellor who describes 23andMe's carrier screening tests as "the bane of their existence". Those reports seem not-so-easy to understand based on the patients she sees. One problem is that they warn that your offspring are at high risk fo…

I have very weird metabolic problems... the US medical model --- if you can't diagnose it in two or three visits-- it doesn't exist.

I actually have the 23andme kit right here-- I plan to get the genome data to submit to some other services to see if there's ANYTHING I can learn about what's going on with my body.

My doctors have basically been watching me die.

Re: FDA Authorizes Ten 23andme Genetic Health Risk Reports

#143

Post by gravelc »

soneca wrote: post #19

My opinion is that this test is useless at the least and dangerous at the most. It provides information that in almost the totality of the cases no one can correctly interpretate and transform in actionable health advice. Not scientists, not doctors, much less consumers. But it is sold as a cutting edge scientific resource that will improve your life. It wont. Not even increasing the chance that you might avoid somet…

I agree with this to a point. Obviously, genetic information can be quite informative for non-complex traits or diseases caused by variants in only 1 or a few genes.

The reality is the genome isn't the complete instruction set for what makes you you. The interaction with the environment dataset is missing, along with any heritable epigenetic information. Add to that, our understanding of function is still extremely limited. We still don't really understand how one gene generates different proteins (via alternative splicing) at different rates. Or how gene expression is so finely regulated at a cell-specific and sub-tissue-specific level. The list goes on. Rules that seem to apply to one gene or gene family don't apply to others.

One day, we'll likely get there, but that day is still some way off. For that reason, I see no great reason to have my genome sequenced at the moment, though it'd be reasonably trivial to do so.

Re: FDA Authorizes Ten 23andme Genetic Health Risk Reports

#144

Post by jtmcmc »

sushid wrote: post #14
phkahler wrote: post #6

Is there any way to just have your entire genome sequenced and get all the data in a software-friendly format? At that point there could/should be some open source software for analyzing it and finding common or well understood things like this. That way the software could be updated and people could re-run their analysis to look for newly discovered stuff. I think this would be an awesome amount of fun. I for one wo…

Have you already done a 23andMe analysis? If so, you can check out https://promethease.com/ . It's exactly what you're looking for as they have constant updates that make it worth your while to rescan every year or so.

IIRC but this is what 23andMe used to do before their FDA smackdown.

Re: FDA Authorizes Ten 23andme Genetic Health Risk Reports

#146

Post by grandalf »

I'm surprised to see all the fear-mongering in this thread.

We leave genetic material behind everywhere we go. 23andme analyzes only a small subset of one's DNA.

The most important thing to realize about genetics is that very few health conditions (and even traits) are highly correlated with a specific genotype.

Some are, but the reason something like 23andme hasn't revolutionized health is because the correlations for most things are weak. 23andme does a good job of showing just how weak in the results. I'm 52% likely to have the eye color I have even though both parents have that color. I'm the tallest in my generation (in my family) yet my genes are mostly for below average height.

Over time, with a lot more data and a lot more correlation analysis with health and behavioral data, there will be more actionable information for the average customer.

As it stands, 23andme is useful for the following reasons:

- the data is entertaining. It's fun to find out how much neanderthal DNA one has, etc.

- the ancestry results are interesting.

- the health results make it clear just how little impact genetics has in most aspects of health. Yes there are some big exceptions, but those are a minuscule percentage.

By joining 23andme you get a chance to watch the studies unfold and plug in your own data. For a curious, patient person, this offers a great way to make an interesting area of science a bit more salient.

Re: FDA Authorizes Ten 23andme Genetic Health Risk Reports

#147

Post by tschwimmer »

gleb wrote: post #96
Balgair wrote: post #24

Are they still saying that by submitting a sample to them, that they then own your genome and can sell it to whoever they want? I'd love to get mine sequenced and check it out a bit, but not if they are going to sell it off to a million shady companies whenever they go bankrupt (maybe 50+ years, but still)

Yes, that's exactly what they are saying. That's how they make money. And if that concerns realize that your doctor sells your EMR data, your pharmacy sells your prescription data, the labs sell your blood work data too. https://genos.co/ will do a 75x whole exome sequencing (very good quality even for a clinical test) for $500 with a good customer experience and they don't sell your data. You can then feed the data…

Dang, this promethease thing is awesome. It's crazy that they're offering all this data for free.

It reminded me a bit of an RPG character sheet: +60% resistance to prostate cancer, 2x weakness to alcoholism.

Re: FDA Authorizes Ten 23andme Genetic Health Risk Reports

#148

Post by Gatsky »

I think people are forgetting to ask the key question - Cui bono? Who benefits?

23andme definitely benefits - all the data they have collected is very valuable, and they intend to sell it to pharmaceutical companies etc.

On the other hand, working in genomics, in my opinion the benefit to any one person having their genome tested in this manner is minimal. The simple reason is that most genetic alterations have low penetrance for phenotypes or involve complex interactions.

Re: FDA Authorizes Ten 23andme Genetic Health Risk Reports

#149

Post by WhitneyLand »

butisaidsudo wrote: post #4

> For several years, 23andMe has worked on demonstrating that its reports are easy to understand and analytically valid... I guess these are different reports, but I know a genetic counsellor who describes 23andMe's carrier screening tests as "the bane of their existence". Those reports seem not-so-easy to understand based on the patients she sees. One problem is that they warn that your offspring are at high risk fo…

Can we stop with the unsubstantiated heresay? What condition, what markers, what risk calculation is used?

I recently tried to research these companies to help a friend, and theres a huge amount of innuendo out there along with a lack of detailed and up to date information.

Even the companies seem to be in the dark. One example is I asked FTDNA to explain what the advantages might be to their autosomal only testing vs AncestryDNA's autosomal testing. A "senior" person there essentially said, we have no idea how they conduct autosomal tests so we can't help you.

Off the top of my head every company I can think of goes to great lengths to know the competition, in part to be able to explain their advantages to customers.

But not so for some of these DNA companies.

To be fair, AncestryDNA's web info was so marketing messaged I didn't even bother to ask them the question.

Re: FDA Authorizes Ten 23andme Genetic Health Risk Reports

#150

Post by jamesblonde »

Gatsky wrote: post #148

I think people are forgetting to ask the key question - Cui bono? Who benefits? 23andme definitely benefits - all the data they have collected is very valuable, and they intend to sell it to pharmaceutical companies etc. On the other hand, working in genomics, in my opinion the benefit to any one person having their genome tested in this manner is minimal. The simple reason is that most genetic alterations have low p…

I would have. I had 2 kids diagnosed with cystic fibrosis the same day, so it would have helped me. Many phenotypes are complex, but not all are.
Post reply on HN