3 replies to this topic

[Bonee]

My grandfather is doing a non profit genetic counselling here in Europe (Hungary) and I got him interested in personal genomics
and he would like to test more people also, but I couldn't find anything in Europe which comes near 23andme
Although it is possible to get kits for personal use for them, but me and my grandfather would like to order it from his non profit organisation and order more than one.

I contacted 23andme to get testing kits but they said that they are expanding in North America now
and maybe we can contact them again in a year.

So it would be good to find someone here who could help me with the issue, it doesn't have to be 23andme but we need something like it (many diseases and many snps)

any insight is appreciated

[nowayout]

IMO the kind of results 23andme have is pretty much useless. (And I have 23andme, so I'm speaking from my own experience.) It's almost all things like you have, say, a 2 out of 1000 chance of getting kidney disease instead of 1 out of 1000. What's the use of that? And many of them are like, maybe your chance of high cholesterol is increased according to one SNP and at the same time decreased according to another SNP, which again is pretty useless for all practical purposes.

In the beginning, I thought it would be exciting to see all the results. Now, really, I could have better spent that money on something else.

The state of the art is not mature enough for us to base any lifestyle decisions on that. The predictions are extremely unreliable at this point. You'd better spend your money on regular lab blood tests. They are much more informative and useful - they will tell you directly if your cholesterol is in fact high, and they will show if and how it responds to lifestyle changes.

Edited by viveutvivas, 13 July 2012 - 04:10 PM.

[Bonee]

it is true what are you saying and I have a very similar opinion too
but many people are interested in this test and maybe in bigger numbers also useful for research
i think not all snps are useless, think of apoe and caffeine metabolism and
what makes 23andme better they also tests for ~180 diseases which comes handy for a counselling programme

[niner]

IMO the kind of results 23andme have is pretty much useless. (And I have 23andme, so I'm speaking from my own experience.) It's almost all things like you have, say, a 2 out of 1000 chance of getting kidney disease instead of 1 out of 1000. What's the use of that? And many of them are like, maybe your chance of high cholesterol is increased according to one SNP and at the same time decreased according to another SNP, which again is pretty useless for all practical purposes.

In the beginning, I thought it would be exciting to see all the results. Now, really, I could have better spent that money on something else.

The state of the art is not mature enough for us to base any lifestyle decisions on that. The predictions are extremely unreliable at this point. You'd better spend your money on regular lab blood tests. They are much more informative and useful - they will tell you directly if your cholesterol is in fact high, and they will show if and how it responds to lifestyle changes.

It gets more useful if you download your data, then run it through Promethease. There are some specific SNPs that are very good to know, like the two that determine your Apo E status, or the ones that determine your ability to utilize folate or other micronutrients. It's only ~200 bucks as I recall, so it's a good way to get some nutrigenomic or methylation cycle genetics testing on the cheap, but you have to know how to use it. It also has some very cool genealogy information, which a lot of people are into. I got it on sale for $100, so I consider that money very well spent. I might spend another $200 to get a bunch of new SNPs measured, since it's been a few years since I did it, and there is new technology.