So this seems to suggest there may be plenty of false negatives, but I think the key factors in this article are at the end: Family history and genetic contributions to disease.
I personally decided to throw our 23andme tests out, for a variety of reasons (health privacy being one), but one of them is health anxiety. It feels unnecessarily anxiety inducing to provide this info, in either case. If i have a mutation, I may live with some elevated fear of something inescapable that never materializes. If I get negative results, I may wonder “what about the ones they didn’t check?” Either way, I end up with less actionable information.
Kind of a psychological phenomenon here - more data in this case doesn’t necessarily result in more information, because interpretation matters so much in this arena.
I,OTOH, which I had had my 23&me results years ago since what they tell me now might have prevented a costly experience back then. I totally get the "health privacy" issue, what with Google looming in the background along many dimensions, but for me, that was not a big issue. I also think that there is an aspect of 23&me that is being ignored in the NYTimes piece, the social network growing around real phenotypes in the context of genotypes.
I personally decided to throw our 23andme tests out, for a variety of reasons (health privacy being one), but one of them is health anxiety. It feels unnecessarily anxiety inducing to provide this info, in either case. If i have a mutation, I may live with some elevated fear of something inescapable that never materializes. If I get negative results, I may wonder “what about the ones they didn’t check?” Either way, I end up with less actionable information.
Kind of a psychological phenomenon here - more data in this case doesn’t necessarily result in more information, because interpretation matters so much in this arena.