[sycren]

Perhaps though by analysing your genetic data, you may also help those family members if you find a gene that suggests the likelihood of getting cancer or some other disease which, when treated early offers a better quality of life.

[jacquesm]

This is possible, but consider that a likelihood is definitely not a certainty and that you are at risk of contracting far more diseases with a genetic element than the ones that you will actually contract.

Carrying a gene does not automatically translate into getting a disease or even a significantly elevated chance of getting a disease. That only works if the chance is approaching near certainty, absent any symptoms if you don't use a high enough cut-off you'll be engaging in a high-tech variation of medical students disease.

[sycren]

I do realise that as a bioinformatician, but we need more genetic data from multiple people to see if there are any trends with certain genes that do predict illnesses. I really would like in the future to see blood tests test for everything rather than something specific. While it will be argued that this would create a lot of false positives I think that utilising machine learning and datasets from a whole population we will start finding the probabilities of certain illnesses and will hopefully lower the chance of a false positive.

Recently a University in the UK was doing some brain scans for psychological research using volunteers. Two of these volunteers were found to have brain tumors that they would not have found out about until probably too late which is why I wish testing was more streamlined..