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What company would you seriously recommend?

Messages
759
Location
Israel
Other than 23andMe which does not ship to Israel, and Dante Labs which seems to take too long to sebd results, what company would you recommend for genetic testing for drug reactions and to give clues to the source of one's ME?
 

Moof

Senior Member
Messages
778
Location
UK
To be honest, you're very unlikely to find clues to the source of your ME via genetic testing, because no-one yet knows for sure. Scientists can't put it any stronger than 'there appears to be a genetic component', and that won't change until an exercise is done involving very large numbers of ME patients. A researcher in the UK is currently planning a funding application to do this work – but it will depend on raising the money, the research will take time, and it may not produce clear results.

Drug reactions are potentially useful if you're likely to be in need of drugs for which genetic profiling has been researched. Many of these are powerful drugs that many of us will never (hopefully) need to take anyway. Adverse drug reactions are very common in ME, but they're unlikely to be based entirely on an individual's genetic profile – some will be secondary to the disease.

There's a lot of online talk about subjects like methylation, and you will get some clues from a genetic profile. Unfortunately, it still won't really tell you all that much. Having this or that single SNP doesn't indicate a specific effect on your health, because there's so much genetic interplay and many traits have highly variable penetrance. It's mind-bogglingly complicated.

I hope this doesn't sound depressing – it's certainly not meant to be dismissive of genetic testing as an area of promise in research. I just don't want you to waste your money on something that may be of limited or no use to you at the moment. Few of us have a lot to spare!
 

Lisa108

Senior Member
Messages
675
I've used Dantelabs. My intention was not to find a source of my ME, but rather to rule out a misdiagnosis of ME,
since many diseases share ME symptoms.

The one advantage of Dante is their price. The current Black Friday Offer is 169 € with an advertised turnaround time of 8 weeks.

Despite this, I'd like to try another company and compare the results.
 

MTpockets

Senior Member
Messages
202
Location
AZ, USA
I'm agree with @Moof. We did genetic testing for the entire family due to some other issues that came up that were hereditary. My husband has the very same MTHFR SNPs as I do and he is healthy as a horse. My kids had some worse genetic profiles than I and they have boundless energy. Until they actually pinpoint a gene as being the cause, or unless you are looking for something else, you may want to save the money.