As a deCODEyou reader, you have an active interest in how genetics can help to improve personal health and healthcare. If you are a deCODEme subscriber or have taken one of our DNA-based diagnostic tests, you have already followed up on that interest.

Then again, you may not have had your genome analyzed yet. You may simply be interested in taking part in research, having a scan, or simply in keeping up with the latest discoveries.

But whoever you are, your genome is information about you. And at deCODE, we believe that your genome belongs to you. Over the past decade we have worked with hundreds of thousands individuals who have decided to use their genome to advance our gene discovery work, to understand their risk of a certain disease, or who want to have a broad and constantly updated look at their genome through deCODEme. In every case, we think it is the individual who has the right to decide to use their genome and learn about it as they wish.

Our job is to find the variations in the sequence of the genome that have an impact on risk of disease, and to report to those who use our tests and scans what those findings mean to them. We have done a lot of this – more than anyone else. And because we take your genome as seriously as you do, our tests and scans only detect genetic risk factors that have been validated in multiple populations and to very strict criteria. Many of the risk factors we have found and test for in diseases like heart attack, type 2 diabetes and breast cancer account for a large proportion of the occurrence of these diseases. Some have as big an impact on risk as do some of the major lifestyle and environmental risk factors that are already a standard part of risk screening.

So when we hear august voices argue that you shouldn’t have the right to look at your genome if you want to, or that we shouldn’t test for genetic risk factors until we know everything there is to know about the human genome, we feel obliged to disagree. In this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, we have heard again that it is “too early” to measure genetic risk factors for common diseases. Why? In essence because in the coming years we are likely to discover many more genetic risk factors that will help to round out our understanding of all of the risk factors that exist. To be sure, we will discover more risk variants in a great many diseases. Many will be common but with little effect on risk. Others will be rare but will confer a high likelihood of disease and thus likely be useful components in genetic tests.

But since we already know risk factors that can nearly double the risk of heart attack, diabetes or breast cancer, in a substantial portion of the population, we take the much clearer view that there is an ethical responsibility to make tests for these risk factors available as widely as possible. As our CEO, Kari Stefansson, was cited as noting in the New York Times yesterday, our tests can identify people who are at several times average risk of major diseases, and there is nothing trivial about that sort of increased risk.

After all, we believe that testing for cholesterol is a good thing, even though our understanding of just how LDL impacts risk of heart disease in incomplete. Similarly, we are only now learning how to optimize the use of statins (and that our heart attack risk factor on chromosome 9p21 has been shown to be helpful for finding the best dose for individuals). How many lives would have been lost if we had taken statins off the market until that elusive day when we thought we understood everything about them?

In our view the challenge is rather to try to bring genetic risk factors into clinical practice as swiftly as possible. As an article this week in The Times points out, a deCODEme scan has a lot of actionable risk information in it. But one of the things we need to do is educate doctors about how to use such results  and how to integrate genetic risk into everyday screening. Our own experience with doctors is that most are very eager to learn. Moreover, genetic information complements what they already do and helps them to deliver better and more personalized medicine to their patients.

In the past few years we have made rapid strides in identifying the key genetic risk factors for some of the most common diseases in our society. Very large independent studies have established that detecting these risk factors can help individuals to act to protect their health and to get the treatments that are best suited to them. This is precisely the sort of information that is going to make it possible to transform our healthcare system into one that is both more effective and efficient – focused on preventing disease and treating it early, rather than spending vast sums of money once people are already seriously ill.

You and your genome are already at the heart of this transformation. If someone tells you that you need to wait, or that they will decide whether and what you can learn about yourself, you need to set them straight. We’ll be there with you.

Dr Edward M Farmer
Chief Communications Officer
deCODE genetics Inc.

Link: Read abstract in Nature Genetics