Why, yes, that *is* my dinner

[stef_tm]

I just had two sprouted corn tortillas and some lovely casa chica guacamole for dinner. As the inner child was about to whoop with joy, I realized my parents would have been fine with my having twinkies and hohos for dinner. Really takes the subversive right out of it.

Lately epigentics and standard genetics have been on my mind. I received my SNPs from 23andme.com and promptly ran the raw data over at SNPedia (using their Promethease program.)

Nothing unusual. What was gleaned:
- I am white; all northern European all the time with a haplogroup of H2a2a.
- I have blue eyes with a gray/green variant.
- I carry a type for curly hair and a type for very straight hair. We know which one won, though my gray hair is curly. Perhaps it's a tie.
- Some nice markers that indicated reduced risk of various cancers and type 2 diabetes.
- Markers that indicate I am 7x less likely to respond to anti-depressants
- Indications that I am a significantly higher risk for Macular Degeneration; increased risk for Alzheimers.

I also carry markers that I should be taller than average (I'm 5'2"). When I was two, the time when pediatricians tell parents to double the child's height to guesstimate the future adult height, my estimate was 5'8".

Must be those twinkies and hohos.

Comments

[curiouseve.livejournal.com]

...and all that smoking....

[balmofgilead.livejournal.com]

I was supposed to be 5'8" by that predictive method as well. I'm 5'4".

[revdrmarsh.livejournal.com]

I am SHOCKED that you are all white ;)

[hippiedork.livejournal.com]

my mother actually fed us hohos and dingdongs for breakfast. and altho i am 5'7 i come from a family of giants and suspect i should have been taller. also, the dna analysis sounds very interesting!

[6-bleen-7.livejournal.com]

Wow, you're the first person I know who have done 23andMe. Are they still running the Affymetrix 6.0 chip? I could tell you more about that SNP set than you'd ever possibly want to know, having worked intimately with it for a couple of years now.

I'm actually working on a couple of studies looking at age-related macular degeneration. There are several SNPs that show up as risk variants in every study done on AMD, but their effect sizes are quite small (odds ratios of 2 or so).

That said, I would take those genetic results with a long ton of salt. Genetic variants that predispose toward (or protect from) complex diseases like cancer, except for a few high-penetrance variants like BRCA1 and BRCA2, are generally specific to the population and data collection method used to do the genetic study. They're notoriously difficult to replicate in independent studies. Currently, known risk factors and family history are better predictors than SNPs with small apparent effect.

[stef-tm.livejournal.com]

I'm happy to send you the raw data if you'd like a peek.

I'm not too concerned re the diseases - my Dad is 82, smoked heavily well into his 50s, and as far as I know has no AMD (nor did my maternal grandmother who lived into her late 80s, or my father's siblings one of whom died at 93.)

I am interested in the geneology and the fact that I am "related" to so many people on 23andme who are Jewish-identified. I had always suspected my maternal grandmother was of Jewish ancestry; the question is how did she survive living through WW2 German?