All in the Family: Aug 19, 2009

Steve Murphy, otherwise known as the Gene Sherpa, points out a conference next week, hosted by NIH, on family history and health. The State-of-the-Science conference runs from the 24th to the 26th in Baltimore and will include evaluations of the usefulness of family histories in disease risk assessment, accuracy, and evidence of how knowing family history affects health outcome. Murphy says that family histories include information that genome scans can't — such as the interaction of genes and environment — and he looks forward to a similar evaluation of using genetic information as a predictive tool. "When placed side by side with the state of the science for a family history, we will soon see why family history is the preferred screening tool and will likely to continue that way, perhaps in conjunction with a genome scan, but genomes will NEVER replace family history," Murphy blogs.