Would you pay to find out what diseases you face?

Personal genetic testing is big bucks. You can find out – and do your best to prevent – illnesses you may face in later life for less than $500. It’s simple and you can even get one of the tests on Amazon.com.

Interested? All you have to do is order a kit from an online store, examples of which include pathway.com, navigenics.com and 23andme.com. You then provide a saliva sample and send it back. This will be analyzed in a lab and your results will be available online. You can learn about your response to drugs, propensity for diseases and whether you could pass on a disease to your children. Diseases being tested for include diabetes, heart disease, cancers and Alzheimer’s disease.

How could such information benefit you? Navigenics provides some examples of prevention measures you might be able to take with the results of a test. 

• If you are at increased risk for both a heart attack and osteoarthritis, regular exercise will benefit your heart. But with your other risk in mind, you'll also know to keep that exercise low-impact.
• If you need one of several common medications, such as drugs designed to lower cholesterol or prevent blood clots, you can discover your predispositions for side effects or reduced effectiveness ahead of time. You can avoid these problems, and work with your doctor to choose medications that are right for you

However, it’s a young industry, based on a revolutionary and fast-improving but still nascent science, and there have been problems.

One company, 23andme – the name refers to the 23 pairs of chromosomes, or strands of genes, in each human cell – gave customers the wrong information after a lab error. As reported in the FT last month, this meant one client was led to believe that her son was not her own, while another was given information showing she was of African origin, while the rest of her family is Caucasian. The company is strengthening its procedures to ensure this does not happen again.

Even before this mistake, there were concerns about personal genetic tests, particularly their sale directly to consumers, with no necessary mediation by doctors.

Some fear that the tests offer incomplete information; how after all does a customer interpret results about their risk to an incurable disease such as such as Huntington's or Parkinson's?

Different testing companies may produce a different set of results for the same customer as their tests vary, a fact that is acknowledged by the companies themselves.

The US Food and Drug Administration, which had left the industry alone until now, has just called for regulation of the companies. 

My instinct is that with proper regulation, it is a choice people should be allowed to make themselves. But what if a customer of one of these companies found out they had a problem and then went to the NHS demanding pre-emptive medical attention? Should NHS doctors act on the results of an exercise carried out by a private US company, regulated or not?

Would you want to find out you had an incurable disease – one that otherwise may not have reared its ugly head for many years – even if you could take steps to delay it?