Pardon my ignorance - what does it mean to have SNP rs1983891 (what pops up when I search FOXP4 in my Promethease report) but not rs9367106? I have only rs1983891(C;C).
You're probably right. Look at figure 3 in the paper. The effect is for region upstream of FOXP4. The reported Prometheus snp ( rs1983891 ) is not in this region, it is in an intron in FOXP4.
There's a lot of discussion here about getting tested for the gene, but the gene isn't as important as you might think from the title. The article states that the gene is associated with "1.6-fold higher odds of developing long COVID". So it's just one factor among many.
The language there is weird ("fold" is always an ambiguous way to express relative increases, but it's especially weird here). I assume that means a 60% higher chance?
In which case a 60% increased probability is a very significant increase. Seems like a valid thing to test for when assessing someone for long COVID, given it still remains somewhat of a diagnosis of exclusion.
"Increase" is ambiguous here. If I said a 160% increase, that is typically taken to mean that the new value is 260% of the original. So "1.6-fold" could mean the same, or it could mean 160% of the original.
No, the "-fold increase" form specifically means multiplying by that value, not adding that multiple of the value. A "3-fold increase" always means increasing to 3 times the original value, not adding 3 times the original value (which would be a 4-fold increase). See [1], the wiki link in the sibling comment to yours and many other results from googling "fold increase".
The percentage variant, in contrast, is indeed ambiguous, the "60% increase" mentioned in the comment I responded to ironically only being unambiguous because the purely multiplicative interpretation (going to 60% of the value) would be a decrease. Such ambiguous use of percentage changes is common and annoying, and it would be good to see more use of the unambiguous "x-fold increase" wording.
If it changes your odds from "1 in 100" to "1.6 in 100", you might have better things to spend your time worrying about. Absolute risk is important to keep in mind, not just relative risk.
Depends on things like other risk factors, though. And like you say, if you can isolate ten genes that each have a similar effect, then you're getting somewhere.
Getting in a car today probably increases your odds of brunt force trauma by 1000x that day, but in the end the odds of dying that day in a car are still very low.
Get your DNA sequenced or checked by a private company in Canada where they don't share this information. You will pay much more but you lessen the risk of it being sold or shared to insurance companies.
George Bush (junior) signed a law barring insurance companies from using DNA data for health insurance pricing etc.
I was surprised by this b/c my assumption was that insurance companies would want that and Republicans would push for it. The law passed 95-0 in the Senate though so this seems like, along with robocalls, something everyone is opposed to.
I think that still holds true for the most part, except that Democrats are also very much pro big business. The businesses they support aren't always the same though. Democrats are a lot more friendly to the entertainment industry than the fossil fuel industry for example.
Good to remind people that this law won't protect you from being discriminated against when it comes to life, disability, or long-term care insurance. It also didn't keep health insurers from discriminating against you for any genetic illnesses that you already had. It was just supposed to protect you in situations where your genes showed you were more likely to develop something. Today, discrimination due to preexisting conditions may be covered by other laws.
Today pretty much every baby born has their DNA taken and that can end up being used by law enforcement, but adults can try to avoid giving their DNA to the government, drug makers, and data brokers by not using services like Ancestry.com and 23andMe.
Yeah I don't see how this is going to be enforced. I think it's safe to say, unless you go to extraordinary lengths to ensure your genome data is safe, don't get it sequenced. A genome is forever. Like way beyond your own life. Your entire lineage and extended familys lineage.
Here's my genome: https://my.pgp-hms.org/profile/hu80855C
Let me know if you can actually find anything interesting- the last time it was analyzed the genetic counsellors said I had no known genetic risks.
Of course we are not ready yet to read the genome as if we know everything, but that's just a matter of time. You can't predict the environmental component of course but that still leaves 30-70% of every trait you have or will have be predictable. For perpetuity. And not just you, but your kids as well? What are the odds they'll not be living in a totalitarian state where it's perfectly okay to persecute them based on their genetics? Why would i put them at a disadvantage potentially by already publicizing half their genome?
Canada has an Office of the Privacy Commissioner whose job it is to actively promote privacy rights and respond to complaints about abuses: https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/about-the-opc/
Palfir genetics is a company I have used for delta-32 check and some other things. Ranges from $200 and upwards. They are located in Toronto. Their website has more details about what they offer and their privacy policy is detailed.
The big qiestion for me is how many other viruses cause long-covid-like symptoms? I suspect that there are a significant amount of people who have fatigue and depression issues that have actually been infected with a virus and have been misdiagnosed.
It's great that there is progress towards better diagnosis.
There is much more information about Long Covid than the general public is aware of. The assumption that it is merely a wide range of vaguely defined symptoms isn't valid.
This. There's more understanding now, and less ambiguity. Long COVID is an inflammation disease, and can be seen in MRI scans of heart, lungs, and brain.
Recovery seems to be in the first year or not at all. “As soon as it’s 12 months, it plateaus,” says study co-author Tala Ballouz, an epidemiologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. “You have a higher chance of recovery during the first year, and after one year it really becomes more of a chronic condition.”[1]
The incidence is estimated at 10–30% of non-hospitalized cases, 50–70% of hospitalized cases, and 10–12% of vaccinated cases.
Since roughly everyone should be expected to become infected, doesn't this mean that 10-30% of the population would have had, or should expect to get, Long COVID?
That just doesn't tally with what you see out in the world.
A sizable chunk of the work force has dropped out due to long COVID. You don't see them, because they don't show up at work or go out much. They're just not there.
The term Long Covid (shortened here to "LC") covers an array of symptoms and severities. For example, depending on who's defining the duration, if after infection you feel light fatigue for 3 months and it then goes away, you've had LC. Most people I interact with have no idea I've been experiencing LC for a year. I know what it's done to my stamina, but they usually don't.
Right. That can start to reconcile things. But it is not only not visible from afar, but nor is it reported in smalltalk.
> [LC] covers an array of symptoms and severities
I'm fully behind the need to break down the array and make it studyable.
But, unless you net in a sizeable cohort for whom the symptoms were ultimately transient, barely noticed, or successfully managed by the sufferer, it simply can't stack up with the reality of life.
I'm aware that headlines generate $$$ for research, but 10-30% means it has to be ascribed to marketing over science. It's essentially an irrelevant figure in serious any analysis.
> I've been experiencing LC for a year
Right. And it is that long tail of high-severity/low-incidence research should focus. But here we're talking about 0.1% of the 10-30%.
> Right. That can start to reconcile things. But it is not only not visible from afar, but nor is it reported in smalltalk.
I imagine whether you hear it in smalltalk varies a lot by peer cohort, average age within the cohort, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's distributed very unevenly across the population.
Using my cohort as an example: A brother-in-law took 18 months to feel normal again. One of my neighbors reported that three of her friends took at least 3-6 months before they felt better. She herself got it and said it took "months" to feel better. Yet my boss said I'm the first person he knows who has LC.
One thing's for sure: Covid seems like a pretty bizarre disease. :-)
Nothing nearly as common as Long COVID, but yes, ME/CFS and neurodegeneration seem to be linked to herpesvirus (re)activation, often following another immune or stressor event.
I'd guess poor gut microbiomes and sleep disordered breathing caused by poor jaw development and nasal breathing issues to be far more common causes of fatigue and depression.
But yeah, science is slowly waking up to the fact that turns out that psychiatric conditions are, after all, caused by physiological factors in way more cases than we used to think.
Vaccines for herpesviruses are not easy to make because the virus can evade the immune system by laying dormant in nerves, among other things. It's just a tough family of viruses to pin down. There's a phase 1 EBV vaccine [1] but it'll be a while before we see progress.
It's weird how unimaginative this field seems from a distance.
What is stopping modern medicine from engineering a competitive virus/bacteria/fungi that lurks about nerve bundles, attacks the herpes virus, and self-deprecates itself after.
Whoever come up with the idea of "God", a grand genius master architect, clearly had no understanding of how unbelievably shitty the engineering of living organisms is. I really cannot emphasize enough how poorly designed our bodies are. A physical manifestation of uncommented, heavily obfuscated, spaghetti code that's only viewable and editable in binary. And every "program" (human) is different and unique.
Yes, living things are amazing, but any designer approaching even basic levels competence factors in repairability and serviceability.
So all that is to say: It's crazy complex and any single thing is liable to have myriad first order, second order, third order...30th order negative effects.
Here's what stopping modern medicine from doing that:
1) we don't know how to make what you describe
2) if we did, we don't know if it would be safe to put in humans
3) the consequences getting this wrong could be very severe
4) getting such a thing approved would be nearly impossible because we have no idea how to evaluate something like this.
It's not from lack of imagination- even if you solved the technical difficulties (which are copious), there would still be huge regulatory burdens to overcome (which are even harder to overcome than medical research).
With that said, we've already done similar things with lentivirus, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lentiviral_vector_in_gene_ther... but one side effect is cancer, another being complex immune system reactions. Lentivirus are useful because they can invade non-dividing cells, for example nerve cells aren't dividing, which means most viruses won't target them.
I worked in this field for a few decades but it was all wasted time. Nobody is going to support you working on a research project like this.
I'm unaware of ANY viral infections having any upsides, possibly excepting whatever's native to our gut microbiome. And herpesviruses are very complicated to fight against.
Acute onset ME/CFS is also frequently linked to a viral infection.
I think there is a lot of overlap with burnout too.
Basically when you are in a chronic state of stress from work or other factors, a viral infection can be the straw which breaks the camel's back, which can provoke a burnout.
I think it's time for a 'war on viruses'. Pick the top 10 viruses by human impact (both initial infection and suspected ongoing health degradation). Make mRNA vaccines for each, and spray them from a plane over major cities.
Repeat every month as new variants start to spread.
Consider it a 'nationwide immune system'.
Would there be ethics problems - surely yes. But if it can be shown to save lives, can we ethically not do this?
Seeing how the Covid vaccine is measurably saving lives and how the republicans managed to make it a political issue and a matter of “personal choice”, you can be sure there are no chances of that happening. The period of doing things for the greater good and mandating vaccine is just over
I have to laugh at this 'not in my body' argument when a lot of people making it are putting all sorts of stuff in their bodies which are very questionable: sucking down sugary drinks all day, eating junk and processed foods, even taking street drugs (who knows what in that).
Let's cut to the heart of it, this 'not in my body' argument is just a rationalisation for an oppositional personality trait.
Hey, I hate being told what to do, but I don't push it to the point where I refuse to do something which benefits me.
That's not the issue, it's that Republicans played down the dangers of Covid while playing up the dangers of the vaccines. It's okay to decide what goes in your body, it's not okay to lie to people to influence their decision what goes in their bodies.
Covid isn’t actually that dangerous for the vast majority of people. We have almost four years if data showing that.
The vaccines dangers are questionable. There are huge incentives to cover up any dangers and pharmaceutical companies and governments have a long history of covering up dangerous medial products and drugs.
For most populations, covid is not nearly as dangerous as what got pushed by the media. We have tons of actual data to back that. The median age of death from covid is higher than the average life expectancy of a human. Most healthy people under the age of like 70 will handle covid just fine. This is an absolute fact that downplays nothing.
There is nothing that isn't a fact about what I just said. I'm not downplaying anything. You are, in fact, overplaying the risks of covid. Which itself is a form of misinformation that somehow has been allowed to continue to circulate.
> For most populations, covid is not nearly as dangerous as what got pushed by the media. We have tons of actual data to back that.
What danger got "pushed by the media"? Are you talking about right-wing media that downplayed the dangers all along ("it's just a flu!")?
> The median age of death from covid is higher than the average life expectancy of a human. Most healthy people under the age of like 70 will handle covid just fine. This is an absolute fact that downplays nothing.
Sure. Most healthy people will still benefit from the vaccines, as they lower the chance for long Covid for the ~10-15% of healthy people who don't handle Covid just fine, and it - you know - keeps those not healthy and under 70 from dying. Small things like that.
> There is nothing that isn't a fact about what I just said. I'm not downplaying anything. You are, in fact, overplaying the risks of covid.
Where have I done that? You just went off and said "it's not that dangerous" without even stating what you're comparing the level of danger to. You were, literally in the most literal sense, downplaying the dangers of Covid while talking up the dangers of the vaccine.
Once you unsubscribe to political tribalism you will see how badly your tribe played you.
Trust me. I was you before these lockdowns. I even phone banked for Obama. I had nightmares when trump was elected. I sneered and disowned trump people. Now I’m a political orphan who will probably never again vote (D).
My (former) political party tossed literally their entire platform to hitch onto covid hysteria.
Stop playing tribalism. It isn’t healthy and sets you up to get played. We are all just people. Most of us are right in the center just trying to live. Both parties are authoritarian, fascist assholes that want to steal your rights.
Covid was and is real but it turned political and not in the way you think. You and a lot of other people like me got badly, badly played. Once you realize that, all the mental gymnastics required to support your takes on covid melt away. And even better, you can finally stop hating other people. Unfortunately it also means you’ll have to accept you probably wasted three years of your very short life playing covid theater and getting all worked up about other people (rightfully) disregarding all of it…
Covid and other recent phenomenon have really turned tribal affiliations on their head. In America this is dems vs republicans, but there seem to be nearly equivalent factions in most western nations. I've had a similar trajectory to yours (worked on democratic campaigns, etc), but I drifted outside the tribe bit by bit and was fully out by the time Clinton secured the nomination.
It's not hard to see that each of these factions have taken views (quite stridently in fact) that would have been anathema to their positions not all that long ago. Views can evolve, but we're talking about total reversals in a very short period of time.
This is fine with me, but what's been very eye-opening is listening to the same people who were stridently in favor of view X just a few years ago are now stridently in favor of Not-X, and not only that, they think you're a monster for thinking X.
It's not R vs D, it's tribalism, as you said. I just didn't realize how strong it is and how close-minded it makes people to alternate views. Belonging is clearly an incredibly strong thing in humans, the need for it seemingly making suspension of disbelief involuntary. I'm aware I'm probably _still_ stupidly believing things for no reason than some group I like thinks it, so this isn't me being superior. It's just something we as humans should be wary of.
> Once you unsubscribe to political tribalism you will see how badly your tribe played you.
> Trust me. I was you before these lockdowns. I even phone banked for Obama. I had nightmares when trump was elected. I sneered and disowned trump people. Now I’m a political orphan who will probably never again vote (D).
My guy, I'm not even from America, and I don't cleanly fit into your political system. It's pretty rich of you to say "I was you" when I haven't stated my own position so far. Yes, I know, you want to project your own journey onto me to make it seem like you're more evolved than me - that's what enlightened centrists who just so happen to veer right always say. But if you jump the gun and start this before I clearly state my own position it will just make you look like... well, like you do now.
> My (former) political party tossed literally their entire platform to hitch onto covid hysteria.
Really? The Democrats left their entire platform behind? If I were to compare Bidens platform today with Obamas from 2012 there would be no overlap? Nothing about healthcare, or social services, or taxes etc?
> Stop playing tribalism. It isn’t healthy and sets you up to get played. We are all just people. Most of us are right in the center just trying to live. Both parties are authoritarian, fascist assholes that want to steal your rights.
I'm an outsider looking into the clusterfuck you guys call politics. I'm stating my subjective views as such. What you call tribalism I call "human decency" - calling out people who downplay the dangers of a virus for example is something we should all do for those who can't anymore, because they died.
> Covid was and is real but it turned political and not in the way you think. You and a lot of other people like me got badly, badly played. Once you realize that, all the mental gymnastics required to support your takes on covid melt away. And even better, you can finally stop hating other people. Unfortunately it also means you’ll have to accept you probably wasted three years of your very short life playing covid theater and getting all worked up about other people (rightfully) disregarding all of it…
The funny thing is that you haven't stated any single specific thing that got changed, or that I should change my mind on, or that signifies your move to "the center" (as you call it). It's all just platiudes and big nebulous terms ("my former political party tossed literally their entire platform", "you and a lot of other people like me got badly, badly played", "all the mental gymnastics required to support your takes on covid melt away"). Is it possible for your to say anything of value?
Sorry, but I think the person you are responding to is probably technically correct in this case. Many people formed their opinions about COVID during the early pandemic where there were lots of breathless articles about children dying,
COVID risk seems to be mostly related to other, known risk factors that are personalized.
This is supported by most current medical literature.
It's already well known that there are huge numbers of vague symptoms caused by viral infections, but the topic wasn't nearly at the top of people's minds before COVID.
For example, herpes viruses. They are widespread and likely cause any number of health problems that are hard to disentangle.
I got a friend who had leptosporosis, on top of depression. 12 years later he still suffers chronic fatigue.
His only recourse after doctors were clueless was a naturopath. Now high dose of vitamins and never ever stopping is the only way he can stay moving. I'm talking like 100hr weeks doing beekeeping moving beehives around the country, dragging tonnes of beehives using 4wd and trailers, winching up 4wd tracks etc and in the off season wheeling and dealing vehicles.
If he takes a holiday his immune takes a dive and he gets sick as a dog.
I had COVID, back before it was fashionable (February, 2020). It took me 10 months to feel normal again (the acute symptoms lasted 2 weeks. I hadn’t been that sick in decades).
Fatigue figured prominently. While I was experiencing acute symptoms, getting up to go to the bathroom basically finished my day.
I thought I had pneumonia, and the really scary stuff stopped, just before I was going to go to hospital. Thank Cthulhu I didn’t go. They would have killed me, and I would have infected a lot of people (as it was, all my family and friends got it. Share, and share alike).
Well, even more obvious is that concentrating large numbers of infectious people in an area that shares ventilation with a large number of unhealthy people seems to increase the infection rate significantly.
I believe most hospitals had patients were in isolation wards. Seems they use negative air pressure to prevent the spread of airborne diseases. [1]
Considering that diseases which spread through the air existed long before Covid wouldn't it be obvious that hospitals would be properly set up to isolate patients and avoid infecting visitors and people at the hospital for other reasons?
I really don't know, and I won't get drawn into an argument over it. I'm absolutely gobsmacked at people wanting to fight over this stuff. It's ridiculous.
It was what it was, and it is, what it is.
Still here, and still breathing, so that's a win, in my column.
In one comment you said "just before I was going to go to hospital. Thank Cthulhu I didn’t go. They would have killed me, "
Then when asked why you would have died you said
"In the early days, they jammed you onto a respirator.
Apparently, this was the worst thing you could do."
Are you not implying doctors at hospitals were acting against your best interest? Specifically the use of "they" instead of saying "it would have killed me" (as in going to the hospital)
For those who have/had long covid, the big question seems like whether it is worth doing a genetic test to find out.
On one hand you'll know and be able to blame your genetics while working with your healthcare providers on any developing treatments. On the other hand, that data could potentially be used against you in the future for life insurance, disability insurance, or long term care insurance.
Seems like a damned if you do, damned if you don't type of situation. Make sure you read the privacy policies of any provider you go through. DNA is the most personal, private, and detailed part of you. Is it really worth it?
Until there are strong privacy guarantees around the sharing of this data in one's jurisdiction, which are both 1. enforceable and 2. likely to actually be enforced in practice, it seems that the downside of conducting a genetic test: dozens of companies using that data to make "decisions" about you, exceeds any potential upside.
For many people, like myself and many friends and family, we've already been fully sequenced, so usually when one of these new studies comes out, it's just a matter of going to https://you.23andme.com/tools/data/ and looking up the SNP in question, which I guess is rs9367106. It would be nice if more articles like this would just give the marker and what the variants mean for the study, but I guess we're not quite there yet.
If you only did the normal 23 and me test, you weren't fully sequenced. Just a tiny subset. Since most phenotypes are in fact caused by large numbers of mutations, each acting in a non-linear (non-additive) way, just knowing this SNP doesn't really provide that much information (except if the specific allele is highly penetrant, which seems unlikely in this case).
You can always use a false name and a prepaid card to get the test done. They can probably link it back to you through your relatives if they really want to but in most cases they’re not going to look that hard.
They may not be looking hard today, but I doubt they're just going to delete the information. The information will stick around into the future, and we don't know who will be interested in the data in the future.
Not exactly. You are probably referring to the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA). It protects US persons against employment and medical insurance discrimination based on genetics but doesn't apply to other types of insurance such as life insurance.
Maybe back that up with a source because the three insurances I referenced in my post are not protected by any means. Those are also key insurances for anyone with a debilitating illness such as the topic of discussion.
Based on this research we can say that the gene isn't necessarily responsible, if at all even relevant. It does indicate association, and that's where it ends. They made a probability correlation, layered on top of a subjective pool of symptoms. For those that have never been involved in any research, ask yourself, how could you NOT find a correlation when your subject set is in the billions, all sharing millions of genes in common? You'll find a gene correlated with car accidents if you make assumptions about data like this headline suggests. There is very little interesting here. This is just scratching the surface of a much larger study that is highly likely to also turn up nothing of interest.
Welcome to genomics. But based on your handle, I'm guessing you already work in a genomics-related area.
Genomics has a terrible hype problem, like ML. Genomics researchers have decades of experience making their papers souond far more significant and actionable than they really are.
We've mostly moved past the "we found a gene for..." which sort of considers phenotypes as mendelian (only two alleles per gene, independent segregation, single SNP is highly penetrant, etc) to the association approach, which as you point out, isn't satisfying from a causality or mechanistic viewpoint.
In adopting the association approach we have learned (unsurprisingly IMHO) that most organismal phenotypes (I'm treating this risk as a phenotype, which is a fairly loose interpretation) are caused by the interaction of the environment and thousands of changes to thousands of genes, all of which are non-additive and non-linear.
Yes. Agreed. I think the headline is trying to make it sound like something like this was discovered, but that's far from the level of progress described in the actual research. It's the excess advertising that's ruining peoples' view of science.
It's involved in many things. Like many transcription factors, FOXP4 is intimately involved in the real-time regulation of essential cellular developmental processes, and can act as oncogenes.
In short, genes like this have their hands in so many pies you can't just patch it and not have side effects.
A lung-specific cis-expression quantitative trait loci (cis-eQTLs) from GTEx v.820 (n = 515) and the Lung eQTL Consortium21 (n = 1,103) provided further support for a subset of loci (Supplementary Table 7), including FOXP4 (chr. 6p21.1) and ABO (chr. 9q34.2), OAS1/OAS3/OAS2 (chr. 12q24.13) and IFNAR2/IL10RB (21q22.11), where the COVID-19-associated variants modify gene expression in lung.
chr6:41,515,652G>C, GRCh38, rs9367106 Is the lead variant in the association study, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the causal variant. Genome Wide Association Studies line the one described here are relatively blunt instruments that are hard to interpret on their own, but can point towards next steps. Some plausible hypotheses are:
1) one or several mutations in the protein FOXP4 affects susceptibility to long covid [edit: reading the paper more after my coffee, the affected region isn’t actually in the coding region of FOXP4. “ no variant in LD with the lead variant is coding”]
2) a variant in a region that controls expression of FOXP4 affects long covid.
3) variant(s) in a gene near FOXP4 is actually what’s causing long covid (though this is somewhat less likely given the locations of the snps that are associated).
To make this more complicated, genes starting with FOX are usually transcription factors, meaning they control the expression of many other genes. So it’s certainly plausible that it’s a hinge point that controls a large, amorphous downstream response. I don’t know much about the biology of this gene in particular.
What one could say with moderate confidence after a 23andMe style test (assuming they have one or more associated variants) is that you might be at elevated risk for long covid, but only about twice the likelihood as the general population, assuming I’m reading the figures right. Not insignificant risk, but not perfectly predictive either. Where this result is more useful is directing further studies on the mechanism of long covid and (once we understand that) potentially ways to treat the underlying cause.
The effect magnitude seems about the same as that between obesity and long Covid, sever Covid, and Covid mortality. I wonder if this gene is also associated with higher BMI.
Right now this is just based on probabilities. There needs to be more investigation to say for sure I think.
For example slow COMT people are more likely to be depressed or have some other mental symptoms. And that's because the COMT gene is responsible for producing an enzyme actually breaks down specific hormones so that some thoughts don't linger.
We need to do that work next - what is the probable mechanism - before we should say - this gene causes this.
Can anyone recommend sequencing services available in the USA which have good privacy practices / do not share genomic data with any third parties? (And ideally which delete data fairly quickly)
To help with the process of elimination, avoid 23andme if you care about privacy. They do not delete your genetic data. They claim it is due to current legislation. At best, they only remove personally identifying info.
> Looking, you’re right. Those are regulated at the state level. But it does look like pretty much every state has a law.
The 1st state I checked to validate that, my own, doesn't. The state level laws much like the GINA act only cover employment and health insurance. There is a newly enacted law preventing consumer genetic testing companies from disclosing results without consumer consent, but nothing stopping an insurance company requiring consent for access or requiring their own genetic testing before issuing life or disability insurance. Based upon this I'm not comforted by the assertion that "pretty much every state has a law".
> preventing consumer genetic testing companies from disclosing results without consumer consent
Even if you didn’t consent, genetic genealogy can still be used to triangulate your genome from relatives of yours who do consent. This is still a manual process for now, but it’s very likely that a CODIS-like system to automate DNA triangulation for purposes of fingerprint search will be implemented soon. Only a small step from there to insurance companies being able to deny you coverage based on an “sub-clinical family history” of something.
My previous comment was more about not trusting the comment about state level protection than having an issue with that lack of protection. Life and disability insurance companies already deny coverage based upon "sub-clinical family history" of conditions. They do so based upon gathered family medical histories. They will also deny you coverage based upon a required medical examination. What is the issue with adding genetic screening to the list of tools?
> Life and disability insurance companies already deny coverage based upon "sub-clinical family history" of conditions. They do so based upon gathered family medical histories.
The term "sub-clinical" means "something that has not yet caused you any problems bad enough that you mention them to a doctor, and therefore never makes it into your medical history; and which also would not yet be revealed by a medical examination."
To be clear, a "sub-clinical family history", then, isn't information about your sub-clinical conditions attained from medical data about your family's clinical interactions (that would be a regular family history!); rather, it's information about your clinical or sub-clinical conditions, deduced through triangulation of your (potentially quite distant!) relatives' sub-clinical conditions, which were in turn discovered through genetic screening of those distant relatives, that they themselves did consent to, as some presumed-boilerplate when submitting their DNA to ancestry websites and the like.
There is currently no way for insurance companies to be aware of your "sub-clinical family history" besides just asking you. With automated triangulated genetic screening, they would have a way to get around asking you.
Which makes the process of dismantling or avoiding the regulation actually slightly easier because all you need is one state to defect in order to cause a precedent which then allows for a regulatory cascade.
It’s almost deterministic at this point, and you see how they did it for clawing back reproductive rights.
And this issue is obscure enough for a small enough current population, that you would not be able to actually build a robust counter protest in any kind of sensible way.
So really all it would take is a handful of just Millionaires to care about this problem to throw — let’s call it $10 million - at lobbying in order to make it go their direction.
(downvote all you want but look at the supreme court, Dobbs, and the inability of the democratic party to hold on to power at all--at some point the excuses need to end and the party needs to be judged on the basis of where we've actually wound up)
They also take into account smoking. Playing devil's advocate if a car insurance company can charge you a higher premium because you are male why shouldn't a life insurance company use your genetic code?
Advertisers would get their hands on your data and figure out you’re predisposed to certain foods and stress eating. With that information, they can tailor ads more specific to your genetic traits.
In Canada, the least-trustworthy people I've ever dealt with have been medical doctors, lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats, or some mix of those.
I can't trust such people to put in place and operate any system that truly protects medical privacy.
After the very recent forced masking and "vaccine passports" debacles (which inherently forced the public disclosure of what should be private medical information), and the related coercion and forcing of unwanted medical procedures that such "professionals" advocated for and participated in, it should be clear that they don't take medical privacy seriously.
They would get better financial return by lobbying for better public health strategies against Covid, like regulations on indoor air quality. That would lead to fewer deaths from a multitude of respiratory ailments.
No 23andMe customer data has been shared with GSK. We have shared results of 23andMe research, not individual-level customer data.
In the past we have carried out studies with partners where we shared individual level data and obtained consent to do so. We recruited people with certain diseases to participate in those studies. The data was always de-identified and for research use only.
You linked to the blog of some random marketing firm in Chicago. This is not a legitimate source for news. Actual details of the deal between GSK and 23andme are here:
For the vast majority of cases, a long COVID diagnosis is extremely lacking in rigor. The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution:
You're misunderstanding that paper. The statistical analysis simply shows that a confirmatory diagnostic test had no impact on the likelihood of having most Long COVID symptoms, suggesting that belief in having been infected is as accurate as having had a diagnostic test.
No, a positive test result was associated with only one long COVID symptom:
"A serology test result positive for SARS-COV-2 was positively associated only with persistent anosmia (odds ratio, 2.59; 95% CI, 1.57-4.28), even when restricting the analyses to participants who attributed their symptoms to COVID-19 infection"
The study conclusion says so:
"Although our study cannot determine the direction of the association between belief and symptoms, our results suggest that further research regarding persistent physical symptoms after COVID-19 infection should also consider mechanisms that may not be specific to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. From a clinical perspective, patients in this situation should be offered a medical evaluation to prevent their symptoms being erroneously attributed to COVID-19 infection and to identify cognitive and behavioral mechanisms that may be targeted to relieve the symptoms.23"
Preprint is at https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.29.23292056v... .
A link to the UCSC genome browser of the location of the SNP : https://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgTracks?db=hg38&position=ch...
The location in question is upstream of FOXP4 and in an intron of two genes: FOXP4-AS1 and LINC01276