Genomes in the Surgical Suite

Neeta Tailor, an anaesthetist in Wales, discusses at Genomes Unzipped this week a patient who volunteered genetic information before going into surgery. Patient X, who asked Tailor to discuss her case, had a complication following a wisdom tooth extraction and needed surgery. Tailor, then, had to anesthetize the patient in a way that gave the surgeons space to work. One way to do that would be through an endotracheal tube, and one drug that can be administered during that process is suxamethonium — which Patient X knew from her direct-to-consumer genetic testing results that she might have problems breaking down. "It was interesting to see a patient who was able to provide this sort of genetic information without them or one of their family members having had a reaction before. As a clinician, I wonder if knowledge of this type of genetic information will become more common in the future," Tailor writes. The patient was intubated using a different method.