There are a lot of diseases that had doctors puzzled for years. Some adult patients had mysterious symptoms that doctors didn’t know what to think of and children had some neurological symptoms that apparently had no cause. However, now the doctors claim that they managed to crack at least a quarter of these illnesses with the help of genetic decoding.
Large-Scale Studies
The main point of the latest researches have been to move gene sequencing from the lab to the offices of doctors and it looks like all that work and money spent has finally paid off. The Human Genome Project has been going on for a long time now and as a result doctors are able to help their doctors based on their genetic structure.
Optimization
In order to optimize the researches, the specialists worked only with the genome sequences that contain the recipes of the proteins that the body needs. This represents only about 1% of the entire genome. Until this moment 1,700 patients have been sequenced and gene flaws have been found in 25% of the cases.
Possible Improvements
The specialists claim that the rate will get better as more and more genes get linked to specific diseases. Nonetheless, the results are already far better than in case of the tests ran in the past. Such genetic tests could offer patients the lifesaving treatments that they need.
Practical Examples
The specialists already found three people with a genetic disorder that will make the muscles of the respiratory system fail and if the condition was left untreated, these people could have died. In other cases the sequencing helped parents decide whether they should have another child or not.
Social Impact
If a patient has an illness that the doctors know nothing about, taking all kinds of different tests and trying treatments may be exhausting and very stressing. Once they have gene sequencing they will get the answer that they were looking for and they will be able to make the next step.
Financial Impacts
The sad truth is that at the moment gene sequencing is quite expensive and it is only done as a part of researches. However, as the medical technology develops, the same tests will be offered at lower prices because they will require less expensive resources.
There is still a lot that doctors should know about genes and gene sequencing, but we can say that they are on the right path.
