Motivations for Personalized Genetic Testing Include Explaining -- Not Just Predicting

Last week, I invited the venerable Lee Hood to speak to us at Harvard Medical School, and I was reminded again of his prescience in describing and advocating for "P4 Medicine" -- or predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory medicine -- over 10 years ago, in 2004! And while Lee's vision of P4 Medicine embraces a model of systems biology that is broader than just the genome, the democratization of genetic testing over the past decade falls squarely within the powerful narrative prediction and prevention. Indeed, much of the controversy surrounding direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing when it launched in 2007, and even today, has revolved around the degree to which genetic markers can, or cannot, meaningfully add to risk stratification, and do or do not result in health value. Our work on the NIH-funded Impact of Personal Genomics (PGen) Study has been measuring exactly why people want DTC genetic testing, how they understand their results and what changes they make in their lifestyle or health care. Through our surveys and interviews, we kept hearing that DTC customers were not just interested in prediction, but that they were also interested in understanding conditions that they or their family members already had. So, in our most recent paper, we decided to ask: if a customer has already been diagnosed with a health condition, how does that affect their interest in learning about their genetic risk factors for that condition? You see, if they were getti...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news