Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Tests Should Come With a Health Warning
By Jessica Cussins,
The Pharmaceutical Journal
| 01. 15. 2015
In late 2014, the Google-backed company 23andMe announced that it would start selling its direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic test in Canada and the UK — despite being banned by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from selling it in the United States following misleading marketing.
The genetic test provides information for around 108 health conditions for which some degree of evidence exists, including 44 inherited conditions, 12 drug responses, 12 genetic risk factors and 41 traits. Some conditions on the list are both obvious and innocuous. For example, hair colour, eye colour, and height are among the 41 traits. But many of the results are about important health conditions, and are clearly supposed to incite a change in behaviour.
Genetic testing is appropriate — and can be life saving — when doctors and genetic counsellors interpret complex results and map out the various courses of action. However, DTC genetic testing companies, such as 23andME, deliberately eschew the framework between clinician and patient. Under the banner of personal empowerment, DTC companies proclaim that their products confer a new level of control over one’s health, and that...
Related Articles
By Caroline Kitchener, The New York Times | 08.21.2025
Less than two weeks after an Alabama Supreme Court decision upended in vitro fertilization in the state and prompted a national backlash, over 100 conservative congressional staff members and I.V.F. skeptics crammed into a meeting room a few blocks from...
By Carter Sherman, The Guardian | 08.23.2025
For Erica L and her husband, in-vitro fertilization was the “nuclear option”.
After two years of trying to conceive, Erica and her husband had no idea why they could not have a baby. Doctors said only that they had “unexplained...
By Riley Beggin and Jeff Stein, The Washington Post | 08.03.2025
The White House does not plan to require health insurers to provide coverage for in vitro fertilization services, two people with knowledge of internal discussions said, even though the idea was one of President Donald Trump’s key campaign pledges.
Last...
By Sayantani DasGupta, MedPage Today | 08.05.2025
It's just a jeans ad.
It's not that deep.
It's just social media outrage.
Should physicians care about the recent American Eagle "Sydney Sweeney Has Good Genes Jeans" controversy? What, if anything, does the provocative campaign have to...