The Limits of Genetic Testing

[MindMover]

Are diseases genetic? That's the simplified and distorted mantra we hear every day in the media -- that scientists have just discovered the gene causing this or that disease.

The truth is that genes only very rarely cause diseases. An illuminating new study in the journal Science Translational Medicine helps clarify what geneticists have been trying to explain to us for years: genes influence, but they don't determine.

Gene expression means that you could have the exact same gene as someone else but have no way of knowing what the actual effect of that gene is going to be.
The just-published study examines how often identical twins get the same diseases. Reviewing records of 53,666 identical twins in the United States, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Norway, researchers tabulated how well genes predict the chance of getting a disease. The answer is that they really can't. Predictions based on genes turned out to be very close to useless. As Gina Kolata summed up in The New York Times: "While sequencing the entire DNA of individuals is proving fantastically useful in understanding diseases and finding new treatments, it is not a method that will, for the most part, predict a person's medical future."

Both the study and Times reporting are refreshing. For years, twin studies have been used to convince the public how strongly our traits are based in genetics. Many of us have argued that such "heritability" studies were gross distortions of the genetic reality. Now perhaps twin studies can be used to show the actual relationship between genes and development.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/as-a-predictor-of-disease-genes-are-almost-completely-useless/255416/

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I knew it all along, my jeans only influence the outcome.....I still have to work at it.....

[KT2000]

1. have always suspected

that the premature use of the gene information was to provide cover for corporations.
As the saying goes: Genetics loads the gun; environment pulls the trigger.

We have to take into account the role of exogenous chemicals that influence gene expression.