![]() ![]() That’s difficult to achieve even in human medicine. In order to establish causation, scientists need an awful lot of data-sometimes tens of thousands of test subjects. Crucially, correlation doesn’t mean causation, so a gene that often occurs with a particular disease might not cause it. Scientists have been gathering information about which genes are associated with which conditions, but this is just the beginning of the process. What are those caveats? First and foremost, the research is still in its infancy. ![]() “You know the research, and the research is good, but there are all these caveats on it, and all of a sudden you realize people are using it in a way where they’re not taking those limitations into account, to make decisions about people’s pets.” “I hadn’t realized that they were using these tests in clinical medicine in the way that they were, and I was kind of shocked by it,” she says. Karlsson has been working in canine genetics for many years and is excited about the work that’s emerging, but until recently, she was unaware that some companies are already taking the field’s research directly to pet owners.Ĭloseup of liquid filled tubes in a laboratory. Elinor Karlsson, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the director of the Vertebrate Genomics Group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dog Geneticists Warn Dog Owners of the Limitations of DNA Testing But when it comes to predicting disease in dogs, experts in dog genetics and canine health are sounding the alarm about the limitations of DNA testing at its current stage of development. It’s so tempting, in fact, that dog DNA testing companies are proliferating, selling kits costing up to $200 that test for genes associated with more than 160 conditions. It’s a tempting idea: just take a swab from your dog’s cheek and send it to a lab, the logic goes, and a few weeks later, you’ll know which diseases your dog is genetically at risk of developing, perhaps even before anything goes wrong. These days, an increasing number of pet owners are using dog DNA tests to ward off this sudden heartbreak or help them diagnose existing symptoms. It’s the day every dog owner dreads: a bad diagnosis that drops out of the blue. ![]()
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