23andMe DNA Results In!

It was an exciting day last Thursday. My  23andMe DNA results were in. I had previously sent for 3 DNA kits - one of each for hubs, my brother and me. So when the email arrived from 23andMe I had the fun of going through all 3 sets of results. Phew! I won't pretend I understood it all but it is fascinating.

We are all going to have to do some more reading on DNA to understand it all, so I concentrated instead on the health results. It's pretty impressive. 23andMe DNA shows if you have any at-risk or higher than average risk factors, which of course does not mean you are going to get that specific disorder but might just make you more aware of watching for symptoms.

Our reports showed if we were carriers of certain disorders and if we might have sensitivities to certain drugs or treatments. I learned that both my brother and I have bitter taste receptors that hubs does not have.  All in all the health and medical reports were quite detailed and provided our individual risk % compared to the average. I'm still going over them!

One item I noticed this morning is a printable genetic health summary report which 23andMe suggests might be shared with a health-care provider. Great idea! The site explains it as

This overview includes brief summaries of your 23andMe DNA results for:

• diseases for which you are at greater than average genetic risk,
• heritable diseases for which you carry one or more genetic variants (carrier status),
• and drugs to which you are likely to have an atypical response based on genetics.

There is also detailed information on each disease that is labelled as greater than average genetic risk and suggestions of life-style changes that might reduce the risk.

Of course there were the standard paternal and maternal Haplogroup determinations and so on but I'll talk about those in a future blog post. Not all of our details are in for this part of the testing. Let me end with the amusing finding that my brother's has 2.6% Neanderthal DNA, hubs has 2.8% and I have 3% which puts me in the 86th percentile! Wow I can't believe I'm more Neanderthal than my brother but genetics doesn't lie.

And now I'm off to do more reading on DNA