23andMe for $99
23andme.com
23andme.com
So it's really $159, with another $60 paid every subsequent year as long as you want access to the data (and any new things which they might provide). If you're expecting to subscribe for longer than the next 80 months (six years and eight months), then it might be better to get the normal $499 version. Although, on the page about what the PGS subscription gives you, it mentions discounts on future things, like moving from genotyping to full sequencing, so perhaps it would be worth it. Not quite enough information to say, really.
That said, I'm all for lowering the barriers to people knowing about their DNA, and $5 a month is pretty small compared to many other things (phone contracts, for instance, or getting coffee every morning).
Can you clarify? Are they going to let me get the raw data, or are they holding it hostage and just telling me higher level results from it?
According to the site, the Genetics Information Nondiscrimination Act covers the data provided and ensures you can't be discriminated against in employment or health insurance matters. Though I don't know anything about the GINA beyond the information they provide, this seems to leave out issues of end of life care (IE, can a family member use legal discovery mechanisms to get at info about potential up-coming medical problems in later life as a means to halt usage of a ventilator should you become comatose?) and probably some other things.
Given that the health and the insurance industries have some of the most powerful lobby groups around, I'd be concerned that GINA isn't a guaranteed law for the rest of the life of this data.
If I do this (I'm considering it) then I would do it as John Doe with my PO Box, freshly created email address, etc. Getting kinda OT but there is a similar chain of thought when you get STD/HIV testing that you should do it as a John Doe for similar reasons.
It's $62.95 for shipping it to Germany. Ouch.
I assume there are some legal barriers in place. I would like to know what are they, but haven't had the time to investigate myself.
I'm curious whether folks who have used this service found it valuable? This customer didn't seem to think so; she compared it to a horoscope reading: http://subtlenuances.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/getting-person...
Down with advertising! Adblock for all! ooo! a pretty advert for geek fortune telling! Count me in.
(1) On a population scale, common variants of modest effect are the most informative. These same variants are genotyped by 23andme. However; (2) On an individual basis, rare variants of large effect are the most important. By and large, 23andme does not ascertain these.
So people are missing many variants that are important to them individually; also, the interpretation of most known variants is by inference or prediction, not experimentation.
Let's not forget that, at this point, clinical risk factors still outperform genetic risk factors. Adding genetics to your clinical predictors, for most diseases, does virtually nothing for you. And why should it? Clinically, we can detect that you have high LDL. The fact that your genetics also predicts high LDL is irrelevant unless it can offer qualitatively different information. Risk prediction for the non-prenatal realm is not a particularly interesting use of genetics. For discovery of therapeutic targets, on the other hand, this is golden.
Genetics is still hard. Personalized genomics, much harder still. I'm not opposed to people getting access to their own genetic information, but I support very cautious interpretation. In medicine, each test has a risk: not only the risk of the test itself (e.g., radiation or bleeding), but also the risk of triggering follow-up procedures.
I am also on reddit with the same username. Let me know if anyone can help, my email is pavs.ma (@gmail).
If anyone has any ideas what I can do, here is the email I sent him:
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Hey Christian,
Thanks for the email and willing to do this for me. I just checked to see if I can pay with paypal, it only gives option to pay by card. If I get money on paypal then I will have to transfer it to my bank account and the process takes about 4-5 days (last time I tried it) by then the deal, which is valid till the 29th, will expire.
To make things worse, in the process of doing the checkout I was informed that they have a legal issue for shipping spit samples to NY. :( http://i.imgur.com/hYgzw.png
I might be out of luck for now. But thanks for the offer. I really appreciate it!
Cheers, pavs
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Take the PATH to NJ and mail it out from there :)
Suppose it comes back with a genetic marker for something like Parkinson's. What do you do with that knowledge? You can't just cut down on cholesterol or exercise more - if it's coming, it's coming. All you'd do is spend the rest of your life with a terrible foreboding you can never escape.
Now with that information, you might decide to live more of your life now... You might decide to have children earlier knowing that you will see the grow up before you enter the risky phase in your life when you could develop the condition.
Like Sergey Brin is now doing, you might pay close attention to the research of the condition - perhaps even donating more.
A great resource for that sort of analysis is SNPedia (check out the main page as well): http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/23andMe
But, it doesn't really give actionable results, especially if you're young and healthy.
But mostly this is awesome because the future is here!
Most of the stuff listed on the 23andme site is just looking at slight correlations and assuming causation. (Though there are some major correlations that strongly suggest causation.)
They also trace your mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome so you can see where your maternal and paternal lines originated, if you're interested in that sort of thing.
The part you're referring to is probably the disease risk section, where they show you your comparative risk of various diseases compared to the population. This is simply a better resolution version of your family history of disease, which a doctor will ask you if you ever go to one. Are doctors fortune tellers?
I don't know how things are in the US (I know health care is 'interesting' over there), but one of the jobs of a doctor is to take information and interpret those results for the patient. That's why they spend years training.
Giving patients access to tests directly doesn't seem a good idea at all to me. It's like showing a windows user a stack trace when a program crashes. Most of them won't have any clue how to interpret that stack trace, they'll probably get over-worried their computer is broken or has a virus, etc etc.
Doctors are a fine filter for stupid people, but it they can be infuriating for people like us. My mother is a biochemical engineer, and when she was pregnant with me she was so frustrated by the doctor's dissembling over her amnio, she grabbed the test results out of his hands and read them for herself.
I'm regularly frustrated with the lack of doctors' honesty. I don't need one to decide what I do and do not need to know about myself. I think we not only do we need more direct-to-consumer medical testing, I think we should have better access to our own medical information.
23andme is expensive infotainment without the required education in both the genetic and the mathematical/statistical background.
I can see what you're saying, that if you're a qualified doctor, or have studied medicine for years, then 23andme could be useful, but for everyone else, I think it could be very dangerous.
I like it b/c it is helping me learn about genome research in an interesting way, and it's preparing me to be ready to digest the results of a full genome, another few decades of research, etc.
Plus, the genealogy stuff is pretty interesting.
Mygene offers reports for budding athletes to understand their gene structure better and provides guidance on tuning your training to fit with your genetic findings.
Disclaimer - my company did entire IT and lab automation work including implementing report creation algorithms.
Edit: It's genotyping, not sequencing, so the answer is no. Leaving the question here in case someone else wondered.
Prostate cancer is out there. Quit smoking, eating Red 40 food coloring, and remember...we're here to put a dent in the universe with the time we have!
In general though the tests are much less accurate than the ones you would get from a doctor because they only do a couple of the most common mutations, so if you want to use your DNA for making health decisions then you still need to make an appointment with a clinical geneticist who specializes in whatever you think you might have or be at risk for. (E.g. breast cancer, metabolic deficiencies, etc.)
That being said, I ordered one last Wednesday.