All of Us Research Program’s Return of Health-Related DNA Results will help improve genetic testing for more communities.
The National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program has returned personalized health-related DNA results to more than 100,000 participants. In doing so, the program looked at a specific set of genes that are associated with certain serious health conditions, such as hereditary cancers and heart disease, and observed 32,500 DNA variants. More than 7,000 of these variants had never been observed among people who had previously had genetic testing.
This de-identified information has been added to the public database, ClinVar. Managed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information at NIH’s National Library of Medicine, ClinVar aggregates information about genomic variation and its relationship to human health. Health care providers use this database to help diagnose and manage health conditions, and researchers use it to identify new areas of study. The submission to ClinVar is one way the All of Us is making a meaningful impact to the practice of precision medicine.
More than 230,000 participants have already been invited to receive health-related DNA results, and the program continues to invite 1,000 to 5,000 people each week to view their results. By returning health-related DNA information to participants, All of Us looks to return value to participants as partners of the research program. Those who are still waiting for their results will receive updates on the program’s next steps in the coming months.
Read the full article here.
To learn more about the All of US Research Project, please visit this page.
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.
