I’m a certified genetic counselor and I’ve witnessed the great benefits that can be realized with genetic testing. Genetic testing can help individuals and their clinicians determine if they are at higher risk to develop the cancer, cardiac disease, or...
When I began seeing patients for cancer genetic counseling and testing back in the mid 1990s, one of the greatest fears our patients expressed was that genetic testing could tank their insurability. Frankly, genetic counselors shared this fear. We were entering...
Genetic testing has been available for decades in one form or another. But genetic testing was expensive (thousands of dollars per patient), time-consuming (results often took months to return), and limited in scope (usually one or two genes at a time). As a result,...
For over a century, parents had the option of placing a child for adoption anonymously – meaning that the child and adoptive family had little or no information about the biological parents, and few, if any, means to contact each other in the future. But the advent of...
Over the past six months, I’ve taken some of the most popular consumer DNA tests on the market so that I, as a genetic counselor, can better understand the consumer experience. I took an ancestry test a few months ago and was impressed with the accuracy of my...
