The author of a viewpoint piece published in the Annals of Internal Medicine said, conservatively, three to four million Americans have an identifiable genetic risk for cancer or heart disease.
That estimate alone should be enough to drive the goal of routine genomic screening (GS) in healthcare forward, he wrote, but hurdles remain with implementing that plan into clinical care and demonstrating the value of testing everyone to identify risk factors in a relative few.
“If every preventive care visit in 2018 included GS, an overwhelming majority of us would not receive any information that would prompt significant changes to our current medical management,” wrote Michael F. Murray, MD, with Yale School of Medicine. “This frank reality highlights our relatively limited knowledge about clinically actionable genetic variation. Although it is reasonable to expect that ‘actionable gene’ lists in this century will expand to include most—or perhaps all—of our 20,000 genes, today most well-considered lists range from 10 to 100 genes.”
Murray compared genomic testing to newborn screening (NBS), which started out as testing for just one condition and has now expanded to more than 30. He said GS will only become more valuable as knowledge grows regarding other genes important to cancer, cardiovascular disease and other conditions.
“There should be little doubt that individually tailored health care management plans based on DNA analysis are coming, but the timing of their introduction into routine clinical care is contingent on further demonstrations of clinical utility and proven implementation models,” Murray wrote.
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Daniel joined TriMed’s Chicago editorial team in 2017 as a Cardiovascular Business writer. He previously worked as a writer for daily newspapers in North Dakota and Indiana.