The US researchers recommend that parents should aware about the benefits of testing their children for the genetic risk of some diseases because this testing could outweigh the negative consequences. The parents send a sample to a company via post and they are informed if they have any genes which carry a raised risk of illness.
In the study conducted by researchers from the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center more than two hundred parents were tested for fifteen hereditary variations associated with heart disease, high blood pressure, cholesterol, osteoporosis, Type 2 diabetes and skin, colon and lung cancer.
All the study participants were asked a series of questioner to evaluate benefits like awareness, assurance and prevention with risks like incursion of privacy and psychosomatic discomfort. It was found that parents those offered the hereditary vulnerability test for ordinary avoidable disorders be inclined to believe that the potential benefits of this test for their own child could outweigh its risks.
According to Prof Kenneth Tercyak, from the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, these tests usually do not offer a clean bill of health and can be hard to construe even in the best scenario. Parents, who were offered a hereditary test supported their children also being tested, reported study published in the journal Pediatrics.
However, Helen Wallace, from genetic science lobby group Genewatch UK, criticizes the study by saying that online gene tests often give misleading results because most common conditions like obesity, cancer and diabetes are not predicable from genes, of a person, except in exceptional conditions. Children should not be tested for risk of adult-onset conditions, full stop.
Children should be allowed, when they are grown up to decide for themselves, with medical advice. Prof Tercyak concluded that the findings of the study should remind clinicians and policy-makers to deem children when regulating genetic tests.