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Genomic-testing companies are beginning to advertise directly to consumers with promises that self-paid genetic profiling will help them determine their personal risks for specific diseases and allow them to alter their lifestyles and diets to achieve better health outcomes. Presently, seven companies advertise testing for 69 polymorphisms in 56 genes. To determine whether advertised polymorphisms are associated with specific diseases, investigators searched for meta-analyses and Human Genome Epidemiology (HuGE) reviews that were published from 2000 through 2007.
Of the 56 advertised genes, 24 (43%) had no polymorphism for which a disease association had been reviewed. For the remaining 32 genes, 260 meta-analyses showed that only 38% of tes…