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Comment by stevecalifornia | Hacker News Reader

The pros of using 23andMe has vastly outweighed any cons, real or hypothetical.

Here is a pro: I was able to print out a 3 page report to give to my new doctor that described what medications I had a low / high tolerance for and what medical conditions to look out for as I grow older. My doctor was floored-- and as a result we do a few extra tests every year to keep track of a potential eye condition I am at a higher risk for.

So what is the potential cons? Perhaps my DNA data is used to help make drugs to help other people? Even if it's wasn't aggregated and my data wasn't anonymous I'm still unsure what I am supposed to be afraid of.

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    > I was able to print out a 3 page report to give to my
    > new doctor that described what medications I had a
    > low / high tolerance for and what medical conditions
    > to look out for as I grow older

Respectfully, I've previously paid a reasonable amount of money for things that have given me medical-looking reports back[0], but later turned out to be largely fiction.

What gives you confidence in this report?

[0] Turns out food intolerance tests aren't actual allergy tests. Who knew?

Except you're not supposed to clinically interpret those results. That's why they got in trouble from the FDA sometime ago. And now you're putting extra stress on the health care system and opening yourself up to false positives, which may lead to some really bad outcomes.

>So what is the potential cons?

That these 'results' have not been verified for accuracy and are largely fictitious? That's why the FDA shut them down for providing such reports/predictions. Nobody has proved these reports are valid or useful in any way whatsoever.

http://csmonitor.com/Technology/Tech/2010/0915/How-reliable-...

>In July, a report from the US Government Accountability Office presented at a congressional hearing on genetic testing roiled the waters. The GAO found that direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic test results were "misleading and of little or no practical use to consumers." As a test, the GAO sent identical saliva samples to four leading companies. It found that disease predictions varied widely, "indicating that identical DNA can yield contradictory results" from each company.

If you'd like to send me $100 I'd be more than willing to provide you with pages of sciencey looking reports as well.

23andme doesn't provide this data. I'm assuming you exported your data to a 3rd party service. Could you share which one?

+1 from a 23andme customer who still thinks this was a questionable "funvestment"

They used to

23andme does provide health data in other countries like Canada.

I wonder what it would take to convince them that you are in Canada.

If you signed up for 23andMe when it was considered a medical testing lab rather than a medical device you can get a lot of extra information. I've heard you can use Genotation[1] to get something similar but I'm not sure how good a job they do on explaining things or telling you which parts come from multiple large studies and which are more speculative.

http://genotation.stanford.edu/#start

Promethease (http://promethease.com/) is probably the most well known in terms of getting health trait data

There's also Athletigen (https://athletigen.com/) which focuses more on the sports science side of things.

Can't think of any potential cons or just don't want to? Insurance companies would benefit from this data, all kinds of public and private institutions would like to research it, and as per tradition, advertising industry will find ways to monetize it, as it has done with all information for all of history.

Insurance companies finding your dna and charging you more based on it?

Already illegal.

Yeah, that will stop them.

Laws change especially when there is a lot of money to be made.

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