Thread by @crackedscience

So many people are curious about their genes. These same people might get curious about their “true biological age” and companies are happy to take their money. I just wrote about it. Here’s what I found. THREAD.

23andMe has become the “Kleenex” of the direct-to-consumer genetic testing world. It’s short-hand for the type of product itself. You spit and get back a report about your genetic risk for cardiovascular disease, for hating the taste of cilantro and for having a unibrow.

But there’s a new tide rising: direct-to-consumer EPIGENETIC kits. Already a few companies are offering these very expensive saliva/blood/urine kits ($300-700 US) to give you tailored reports on how your body is truly aging and what to do about it.

Is it pseudoscience? I don’t think so. There’s some real, very exciting science behind these kits. This is not flim-flam that uses the language of science to sell you plastic discs that allegedly realign your quantum chakras. The kits test for epigenetic marks on your DNA.

Epigenetics is the science of how your DNA is essentially regulated. Genes, which are specific stretches on your DNA, code for proteins, which do all sorts of wonderful things in the body. But our genes aren’t always active. Sometimes they need to be silenced

One of the main epigenetic regulations of our genes comes in the form of methylation. Imagine you are visually impaired and are reading a text in Braille. You move your fingers over patterns of dots representing letters.

But if a sentence worth of dots is obscured by adhesive putty, you can’t read it. That’s what methylation does to a gene.

These methylation patterns change due to our environment and our behaviour, and some researchers have found specific patterns in them that correlate with our age. Moreover, there’s a theory that this correlation could change in the face of disease.

You could imagine testing for the impact of smoking, drinking, not exercising using these epigenetic marks and being told you are 20 years older than you think you are, and that you need to do X, Y, and Z to turn back the clock.

But is this technology ready for prime time? That’s what I looked into in my latest article for @McGillOSS: mcgill.ca/oss/article/ps…

I’d like to thank the researchers who wrote to me and whose insight helped make the piece more accurate. @mommyphd2 @notthatdrjones @nprovencal1 & @CaulfieldTim.

Teasing apart good science from bad science is becoming more and more difficult as knowledge grows more complex and specialized. I can’t do it on my own, so thank you to those who help me along the way!

Also, I’m really proud of the title of my piece and stand by it. “Direct-to-Consumer 2: Epigenetic Boogaloo.” Go read it: mcgill.ca/oss/article/ps… #scicomm #epigenetics