DNA Testing--Now why did I do it?

I got caught up in the excitement of a couple of my sisters' DNA testing and I decided I would join the club.  After spitting in a tube (spit, gag, spit, gag, etc.) enough to fill it to the blue line, I regrouped and finished the test, dumping in some kind of stabilizer by pressing a release gadget, and then I sent it off wrapped and sealed in a nice little benign package already prepared and stamped with the postage to Ancestry.com.  They sent me the test tube cup and instructions and so now I send it back. After a few days, I got an email saying they had the test and soon there would be someone reading it.  And it was true.  A few more days went by and I got a notification. I opened my Ancestry account and according to my little helices, 62%  came from Great Britain, 25% Scandinavia, and 9% Ireland. Yes, there is a little percentage missing here but according to DNA experts anything less than 5% is considered "noise." Too bad.  I was a bit excited about the 1% European Jewish.

The second part of the DNA excitement was the raw data.  My sister Brenda told me to download it and then send it to Promethease.com which I did.  20 minutes later they had completed sending it through their computer base comparing me to several others (who are they and how many?) and I got a complicated and interesting report back. I have since taken up a new hobby besides knitting baby sweaters and watching interesting British movies and series on Netflix (Oh! the British! No wonder!).

I am pouring over this report and learning all about my tendencies.  Hmmm, what should I share? The four categories are Medicine, (what works for me and what won't). Medical Conditions (self explanatory), Topics (everything from male baldness to memory to micro-nutrient metabolism), and ClinVar.  What is ClinVar?  I looked it up of course, and read a little about it.  Here is a definition from a blog written in 2013 accessed through Google search:    The purpose of ClinVar is to “provide a freely accessible, public archive of reports of the relationships among human variations and phenotypes along with supporting evidence”.  This means it helps us understand disease and all potential targets for the disease. The writer, from Aspen Biosciences Blog, admitted that ClinVar is a work in progress, which makes sense. Every day new stuff is discovered and added to the database so to speak, and then all of us lay people can Google away and find out cool stuff about our bodies. Or at least the diseases we have a potential to get because of who our parents are, and who their parents were, and so on. 

So how does all this help? Well, one way is you go to your doctor and say "I need some medication for depression, and this, this, and that probably won't help me because my DNA raw data has revealed information about how my body doesn't metabolize those meds. But why don't we try ___?" Beats the old method of "Try this for six weeks and if it doesn't work, don't worry, there are other ones out there we can go to for results." Another little tidbit of info that interested me--my body is not absorbing much of the folate I take in. Why do I need folate? Well it's an essential B vitamin aiding the body in development of red blood cells and supporting the function of the nervous system. Someone said this is linked to our ability to think clearly . . . oh man, if the solution were only that simple.

Yep. Lots to think about.