Detailed information about a person’s genetic makeup and their environmental risk factors does not change their disease risk prediction, according to the results of a new simulation study.
The researchers, from the Harvard School of Public Health, said that much more research is indeed needed before information on patients’ genetic variants could actually help doctors prevent or treat conditions.
“Our findings suggest that the potential complexity of genetic and environmental factors related to disease will have to be understood on a much larger scale than we initially expected to be useful for risk prediction,” study author Hugues Aschard, a research fellow in the epidemiology department, said in a Harvard news release. “The road to genetic risk prediction, if it exists, is likely to be long”.
The investigators examined whether or not disease risk prediction for diseases such as breast cancer, type 2 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis would improve if environmental risk factors were considered along with genetic risk. The authors called this interplay of genetic and environmental factors a “synergistic effect.”
The researchers simulated a wide range of interactions between environmental risk factors and common genetic risk markers related to the three diseases to determine if this simulation model would improve risk prediction.
These disease models, however, showed no significant improvement in risk prediction, and the researchers concluded that with this method, risk prediction sensitivity would improve by no more than 1 to 3 percent.
Study author Peter Kraft, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Health, added: “For most people, your doctor’s advice before seeing your genetic test for a particular disease will be exactly the same as after seeing your tests.”
Comment
A few years ago, official medicine tried to convince us that genome research was going to be the panacea for almost everything, which was a mechanistic and materialistic way of understanding life. Now they realize that it cannot predict almost anything.
We were told in the past that we die with the same genes that we are born with. However, it is getting increasingly clear, especially through studies of epigenetics, that the human mind and free will have, along with environmental and other factors, a great power to shape and change our genes AND THE GENES OF FUTURE GENERATIONS.
Our genes influence our personality, but the way we live and act also influence our genes.
This is just another example of how “science” is supporting more and more every day what ancient traditions have been holding for ages.
How longer will we passively accept what they are telling us, simply because they are supposed to be very “scientific”?
When will start a real debate on what should be considered “scientific”?
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