It sounds too good to be true, but it’s a medical test that can detect diseases that can develop decades later. If you are properly forewarned, you can take immediate steps to mitigate the risks.
This is the promise of polygenic testing, so named because it involves sequencing multiple pieces of someone’s DNA. They’re being developed for more and more diseases, and proponents claim they could revolutionize medicine by helping people avoid everything from type 1 diabetes to heart attacks and cancer. “If we could shift our focus to prevention, we would have a radically different approach to health care,” says John Bell of the University of Oxford. He recently helped launch a large-scale pilot program involving the National Health Service in the UK.
That would be a big step forward. Until now, it was only possible to predict the risk of developing rare diseases caused by a single gene. But soon we will be able to predict how likely we are to have a much more common condition caused by multiple genes.
But some critics say this new era of preventive medicine has been introduced hastily without proper consideration of the consequences. There are also events,” said Amit Sud of the Cancer Institute in London.
What is clear is that with several polygenic risk tests already on the market, the costs and benefits of impending widespread adoption must be weighed before it is too late.
Claims have been made that genetics is changing medicine…
