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Just Gets Up to Move Around a Bit More

While she didn't find out anything shocking about herself, CNBC's Meg Tirrell says she's glad she got her genome sequenced. It puts her, she notes, in a group of medical pioneers.

Tirrell was warned before she received her results that they could reveal that she's at high risk for some terrible disease, but also that the findings could be more mundane. Harvard Medical School's Robert Green, her geneticist, tells her that only a few people, some one percent to two percent, who are sequenced find out about an actionable mutation.

But the results could also be uncertain. Green says that some 20 percent of people have some dominant mutation, but no sign of disease, and others learn they have "suspicious" variants that have been linked to disease but whose roles aren't quite clear.

That's because, as the Broad Institute's Eric Lander tells Tirrell, "[w]e have a big pile of genes that we can say are associated with schizophrenia or early-onset heart attack or many other things. But it's still hand-to-hand combat with the genes to figure out what they're actually doing."

In her case, Tirrell learned that she has two such variants of unknown significance and is a carrier of three recessive, but potentially devastating, mutations.

She also learned that had one clinically significant finding as she has one copy of a Factor V Leiden mutation. That means, Green tells her, that her blood likely clots a little faster than others'. Her pharmacogenetics report likewise tells her to avoid drugs that increase platelet production.

The utility of such tests for healthy individuals is not quite there yet, Lander tells her. But for cancer and other conditions, he notes, there is greater utility.

"I can't say I've made any drastic changes to my life as a result of [getting my genome sequenced], but I have started taking walking breaks during longer car rides," Tirrell says.