Kind of OT...23andme

[davelikesbeer]

I did a search and there are only two threads that mention 23andme.

Since they lowered the price to $99, I pulled the trigger and ordered two kits, one for me and one for my wife. My wife just didn't want to do it, so I'm giving it to someone else.

I'm curious if anyone else has done this. Sleep apnea is not one of the things they have data for, but I'm curious for those who have tried it if/how it has changed your behaviors?

Dave

[johnthomasmacdonald]

genomic DNA sequencing is going to change everything - it is the probably the biggest event in medical history although it will take quite a while to make its way into the clinics and into the cultural consciousness. For example, if we sequenced the genomes of everyone in here and compared it with a matched sample of people without sleep apnea, we will find shared genetic characteristics of those of us with the disorder. Everything is partially genetics. Having your entire DNA sequence will revolutionize the way we look at health care and diseases - at birth we will be aware of the specific risks that each particular child will be facing - you may be at higher risk of obesity and heart disease while i might be at higher risk for multiple sclerosis and cancer

[cosmo]

Sounds interesting. Never heard of it before. I'm going to look into this and probably will do it.

Car/truck geeks (enthusiast) are always sending their used oil for analysis for $25 a pop at blackstone-labs.com. So $100 for DNA is not a bad price.

[davelikesbeer]

genomic DNA sequencing is going to change everything - it is the probably the biggest event in medical history although it will take quite a while to make its way into the clinics and into the cultural consciousness. For example, if we sequenced the genomes of everyone in here and compared it with a matched sample of people without sleep apnea, we will find shared genetic characteristics of those of us with the disorder. Everything is partially genetics. Having your entire DNA sequence will revolutionize the way we look at health care and diseases - at birth we will be aware of the specific risks that each particular child will be facing - you may be at higher risk of obesity and heart disease while i might be at higher risk for multiple sclerosis and cancer

You can register with 23andme and play around to see what kind of data/studies they have. It looks like they do surveys and then the analysis you are talking about to find correlations. https://www.23andme.com/about/factoids/ .

I haven't seen any sleep apenia surveys yet, but I haven't searched very much.

[MidnightOwl]

This intrigues me as well. But at this point I think privacy concerns would prevent me from doing it unless I could be anonymous. And it's not just your privacy but that of all your relatives too.

[BlackSpinner]

This intrigues me as well. But at this point I think privacy concerns would prevent me from doing it unless I could be anonymous. And it's not just your privacy but that of all your relatives too.

Except that it can help them too.

I did the whole anonymous DNA testing for a government data bank to do analysis on genetic diseases. Unfortunately (or fortunately) there was no feed back unless some dangerous anomaly showed up.
http://cartagene.qc.ca/en/introduction

CARTaGENE is a scientific project of the CHU Sainte-Justine which created an infrastructure developed in order to offer researchers the means to enhance their health investigations. This resource includes a health database and a bank of biological samples.

Data and samples collected by CARTaGENE will be coded (depersonalized), in order to guarantee confidentiality.

CARTaGENE could lead in the long term to better prevention, diagnosis and treatments of chronic diseases, such as heart diseases, diabetes and cancer, and thus to the improvement of Quebec’s healthcare system.

[patrissimo]

I did it, and found out I have two copies of APOE4, the alzheimer's gene. Fortunately I have no family history of Alz, but it has many implications for my diet, blood lipid profiles, etc. A close friend of mine found out she had an obscure genetic disease that explained many of her health issues from doing 23andme and then running the data through an open source database (unfortunately 23andme is very chicken about how many conditions they will report on, I think they are scared of getting sued). That said, in the vast majority of cases, all you find out is that you are 20% more or 10% less likely to have this or that, which is totally non-actionable.

They need to understand many many more genes before the data will be useful to most people.