Slashdot Mirror
After FDA Objections, 23andMe Won't Offer Health Information
sciencehabit writes "The company 23andMe will no longer provide health information to people who purchase its DNA testing kit, it announced last night.The change was 'to comply with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's directive to discontinue new consumer access during our regulatory review process,' the statement said. While current customers will still have access to a 23andMe online database noting the health issues associated with their particular DNA, the company will not update that information, and customers who purchased its Personal Genome Service (PGS) on or after 22 November will receive only information about their ancestry and their raw genetic data without interpretation." It would be great to see a secondary market in this kind of analysis emerge.
Perhaps this is why the FDA put the kabosh on it
The FDA was very clear about why they stopped it. It wasn't necessarily that the information was misleading, but that it would lead patients to make decisions about their own care without necessarily consulting a doctor, which the FDA thinks is not a good idea -- and I totally see their point, frankly.
For example, one of the things that 23andMe can tell you is how well you might respond to one drug versus another, because of your specific genetic makeup. If you take that advice and change the dosage of your medication or switch to a different medication without discussing the issue with your doctor, you could cause yourself serious harm.
On the far end of the scale, "false positives" for some diseases could be catastrophic -- say, if a woman was erroneously told she had a high chance of contracting a certain type of breast cancer and decided to have a double mastectomy, like Angelina Jolie had done.
23andMe claimed that all it was doing was giving people information. But really, the way the information was structured and presented to the customer made it clear that it was designed to be diagnostically relevant and that they should use it to make decisions about how to proceed with health care. Any service that performs that function clearly falls under the jurisdiction of the FDA, IMHO.
Breakfast served all day!
The FDA was very clear about why they stopped it. It wasn't necessarily that the information was misleading, but that it would lead patients to make decisions about their own care without necessarily consulting a doctor, which the FDA thinks is not a good idea -- and I totally see their point, frankly.
The FDA made them stop because doctors dislike being cut out of the loop, and insurance companies like being cut out of the loop even less than the doctors, and they would prefer to have you get the data through a disclosure mechanism which gives your insurance company better actuarial information. "Having a Dr. explain the information to the patients one on one" is just a place to hang that hat.
For example, one of the things that 23andMe can tell you is how well you might respond to one drug versus another, because of your specific genetic makeup. If you take that advice and change the dosage of your medication or switch to a different medication without discussing the issue with your doctor, you could cause yourself serious harm.
Yeah, in case you wondered, people can not self prescribe non-over the counter medications. So that excuse doesn't fly, either, since your doctor will be involved in writing the script for the new medication, and your insurance company will be paying for it, and like mine did, probably try to give you a cheaper generic version of a similar drug in place of the one your doctor actually wrote the script for, and then called it "equivalent". I've had that pulled on me, and been given "generic allergy medication" containing a cornstarch binder in place of the other one - when corn products were why I taking the damn stuff in the first place.
Does anyone else find it upsetting that the local CVS is packed with whole aisles of homeopathic "remedies" with no proven efficacy (or worse, disproven), but some company can't tell you what your genes might mean? Apparently the FDA is about protecting what goes in your eyes than what goes in you mouth?