5 ways your DNA matters to your health
Tags: Genetics, Genetic Testing, Healthcare Innovations, Health, Personalized Medicine

5 ways your DNA matters to your health

From informing a pregnancy to screening for cancer risk, your DNA provides valuable information about your health. Invitae Follow Apr 25 · 6 min read

It might surprise you to hear that you share 99.9% of your DNA with everyone else on the planet. ¹ Even so, we’re all unique — especially when it comes to our health.

Understanding how your DNA may contribute to your health can help you receive medical care that’s personalized for your unique health situation. Your genetic information can also influence your healthcare decisions and preventive care.

Here are some of the top ways understanding your DNA might make a difference in your — or your family’s — health:

Inform cancer treatment and screenings

When it comes to cancer, genetic testing is a useful tool both for people who are healthy but may be at increased risk due to a family history of cancer, and for people who have had a cancer diagnosis.

5–10% of cancers are hereditary, meaning a person’s genes made them more susceptible to cancer.²

For those with a family history of cancer, early screening and prevention through lifestyle can potentially be lifesaving.³ Genetic testing is one way to screen for cancer early. It works by looking at your genes to see if you inherited any genetic changes that may increase the risk of cancer developing. This allows you the opportunity to be screened and catch cancer early—when it’s most treatable. It may also give information to help you consider changes to your lifestyle or risk-reducing medications and surgeries that may prevent cancer altogether.

For people who have had cancer, genetic testing can help them and their doctor to narrow in on a diagnosis and treatment plan. Genetic testing can also screen early for other types of cancer that may be related.

Dial in your medications and find the most effective dose

Have you heard of pharmacogenomics? It’s a big, fancy word with a super simple promise — understand how medications (think “pharmacy”) may affect you based on your DNA. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s actually it is a powerful tool for personalized medicine available today, especially for people taking multiple medications which is most common for patients over 65, who are experiencing unwanted side effects from their current medications, or who feel that their current medications are not working. Pharmacogenomics may help hone in on the right medications for an individual, which could be especially important for people considering treatment options for conditions like depression, anxiety, and some types of cancer.

~99% of people have genetic variations that make them unable to process certain medications in the way they are intended.⁴

McInnes G, et al. Clin Pharmacol Ther. 2020. doi: 10.1002/cpt.2122.

When you take a pharmacogenomics test, you and your doctor will have valuable information about how you may respond to certain medications. This can then be used to help your doctor decide what kind of medication, and how much, to prescribe. We’ve seen pharmacogenomics save lives, reduce readmissions and ER visits, shorten time in treatment, and spare patients from uncomfortable side effects.⁵ ⁶

Explain unexplainable symptoms

For rare diseases, taking a genetic test is kind of like taking the carpool lane. In some cases, you can cut past all the traffic and get to your destination (a diagnosis) much faster, and more directly.⁷ ⁸ This is important because the faster you know what condition you’re dealing with, the sooner you and your doctor can find the most effective treatment options.

Currently, genetic testing is able to facilitate diagnoses of over 7,000 rare diseases⁹ and can help patients receive a diagnosis from their doctor in just a few weeks; many rare disease patients have been waiting for years while dealing with unexplained symptoms. For those patients, genetic testing can provide invaluable information that enables them to change the course of their medical care, and their life.

If you’ve been struggling with symptoms that don’t seem to fit into a commonly known diagnosis, genetic testing may help you find answers.

Plan a pregnancy

It’s great to have things in common with your partner, but when reproductive couples have genetic changes in the same genes, it may cause health problems for future offspring. Today, we can screen for that using a test called “carrier screening.” While genetic testing can’t tell you everything, the results can provide you with valuable information and help you make a plan to increase the chance of having a healthy pregnancy and child. Many people have carrier screening in the first trimester of pregnancy, but it is also recommended to be done before conceiving.¹⁰ Whether you’re pregnant or thinking about getting pregnant, carrier screening can help you plan.

If you’re interested in learning more about carrier screening, you can do so by reading “Considering pregnancy? What you need to know about genetic testing.”

If you’re already pregnant, you can also use genetic testing to check the health of your pregnancy. NIPS (non-invasive prenatal screening) is a maternal blood test that can screen for genetic conditions — and bonus, predict fetal sex as early as 10 weeks after conception. You can learn more about the benefits of NIPS testing in our blog post “Pregnant? What you need to know about genetic testing.”

Did you know? 1 in 6 healthy adults is at increased risk for a serious health condition due to their genetics — and probably doesn’t know it.¹¹

Stay healthy

You might have read this far and said, “but I’m healthy! Do I really need genetic testing?” Deciding whether to test is a personal decision. But your genes can give you clues into your risk of developing disease and — if it turns out that you have an increased risk of a condition — there are steps you can take to help you stay healthy.

Some conditions are more likely to appear when you’re older, but knowing ahead of time can help you get ahead of them — and make a plan for screening and prevention.

Take for example, this stat on heart disease: About 1 in 250 people are at risk for a genetic form of high cholesterol. If left untreated, a person with this condition is 20 times more likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke.¹²

Genetics can also play a part in cancer risk. For example:

Between 1 in 200 to 1 in 400 people have genetic risk for breast, ovarian, prostate and pancreatic cancers.¹³ 1 in 300 people have genetic risk for colon cancer.¹⁴

If you’re at increased risk due to your genetics, you can work with your doctor to determine the best prevention or treatment strategy.