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Showing posts from June, 2011

Genetic testing and potential harm: DTC or trust me I’m a doctor?

Recently at a couple of conferences ( European Human Genetics conference and Consumer Genetics Conf ) there have been various speakers questioning DTC genetics and calling for all health related personal genetics to be delivered through medical practitioners. I argued in the past that unregulated tests delivered through practitioners actually have the potential for more harm, not less. By coincidence last week some discrepancies in a DTC and a via MD test were pointed out to me – and they seem topical. Breast feeding has many benefits one of which appears to be increased IQ scores – however not all studies agree, some indicating that results may be confounded by maternal intelligence (see Wikipedia ). Sometimes inconsistencies in associating an action with an outcome can be resolved by looking at genetic variation (which tends to increase the error bars when not accounted for). So in 2007 some headlines were made when a study was published by Caspi’s group ( PNAS, open access )