Predictive Genetics: A New Era in Health Sciences

A few months ago we talked about the Main reasons to take a DNA test . Discovering your unique barcode that, along with environmental factors, determines your personality; knowing your genetic predisposition to certain diseases and medications, having relevant information to improve your quality of life in terms of nutrition and sports; and even discovering your ancestral journey, are some of the reasons that stand out when we talk about the genetic analysis .

And if all this still hasn't convinced you, tellmeGen has added one more reason.

Do you want to meet him?

We'll talk about this shortly, but to fully understand it, I'll need to explain a few things first.

Importance of the environmental factor

Diseases and traits are regulated by genetic factors and environmental factors, that is, lifestyle. Having a genetic variant that predisposes one to a disease may not necessarily lead to the development of that disease if environmental factors do not increase the risk of developing it.

Predictive genetics

The development of powerful computational tools has made it possible to obtain a great deal of information about the origin and behavior of certain diseases such as Alzheimer's, diabetes, and some cancers.

For this reason, diseases or traits have been associated with certain genetic variants, known as Genome-Wide Association Studies ( GWAS ).

These studies are powerful computational analyses that allow us to compare genetic information from thousands of individuals around the world. Combined with whole-genome sequencing technologies, they generate a reference panel. This reference panel is, in other words, a "genetic template."

And this is where the concept of predictive genetics comes in, as it allows experts to identify risk genetic variants, present when the disease exists, and protective genetic variants, present in the genome of patients who do not suffer from the disease.

These advances, using the imputation technique, have made it possible to reshape genetic risk estimation and, thus, provide more accurate and up-to-date results to tellmeGen users.

To conclude:

So, one more reason to take the tellmeGen DNA test is that increasingly more improvements are being implemented in the system to understand our own genetic makeup and be able to act and live accordingly. Thus, implementing changes in our daily lives based on our DNA is being, and will be in the coming years, a revolution in the field of personalized medicine.