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| DNA Anaylsis | |
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Natural Health Solutions mission is to help individuals "achieve optimal health naturally" by discovering their bodies specific needs, addressing these needs, and developing a customized, comprehensive plan to fill these needs. Through behavioral modification, stress management, and nutritional supplementation your journey toward personal health and wellness is right on course.
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|  Why Is DNA Analysis Important?
All diseases, to a greater or lesser extent, are influenced by environmental and genetic actions. Small changes in genes (single nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs) can trigger, promote, prevent or alleviate diseases. With the completion of the Human Genome Project, scientists are increasingly discovering the precise SNPs implicated in the development of many common diseases, including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, malignancy, osteoporosis, thrombosis, as well as how our bodies respond to and metabolize different medications.
For the first time, we are able to fill in the missing gaps in an individual’s overall risk profile of developing many of those diseases which cause significant morbidity and mortality. Given that many of the genetic effects are influenced by environmental and lifestyle influences, knowledge of their unique genetic ‘barcode’ allows individuals to make appropriate lifestyle modifications, to minimize their risk of developing these diseases. This includes specific dietary changes, as nutritional influences are also increasingly recognized to impact on gene phenotype. It is the dawn of a new age in personalized medicine and one which physicians will increasingly utilize in disease prevention.
SNPs – how they are measured and what do they do?
Although all chromosomes contain the same genes in the same order, the DNA sequences making up the genes are not identical. On average, one in every 300-500 base pairs of the genome differs from the sequence found in the majority of people. These randomly occurring changes, which are passed from generation to generation, are referred to as a single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. Consequently each person's genetic material contains a unique SNP pattern that is made up of many different genetic variations. SNPs that are physically close are inherited together as blocks and can be used to distinguish individuals and populations to determine what specific diseases or other traits are associated with different groups of SNPs.
There are a number of techniques that make it possible to detect single nucleotide changes in the human genome. These use different methods to analyze and compare selected regions of a DNA sequence obtained from multiple individuals who share a common trait for SNP patterns. These are compared to patterns obtained by analyzing the DNA from a group of individuals unaffected by the disease. This type of association study can detect differences between the SNP patterns of the two groups, thereby indicating which pattern is most likely associated with the disease-causing gene. This permits the establishment of SNP profiles that are characteristic of a variety of risks/diseases and can be used for screening individuals for risk or disease susceptibility by analyzing their DNA samples for specific SNP patterns.
SNP analysis aims to answer some of the following questions:
What is my individual risk of developing a particular disease?
How likely am I to be allergic to any drugs I am being prescribed?
How successful is the treatment regimen I am undergoing likely to be?
Although many SNPs do not produce physical changes in people, scientists have learned that other SNPs may predispose people to disease and even influence their response to drug regimens. With this information we are able to provide specific nutraceutical formulas to people, based on their personalized assessments. Because these assessments are so specialized, people seem to respond better to them.
This evidence-based information can be very beneficial because it eliminates the guesswork in selecting the best nutritional supplements. This specialized scientific field is called nutrigenomics, and it is the study of how a person's genetic background interacts with other dietary factors to determine their individual response to food and nutrition as well as their environment.
The key is you get the information that applies only to you. Having this knowledge is powerful and because this information never changes your genetic analysis is good for life.
How Do We Obtain The DNA For This Analysis?
Obtaining DNA for this analysis involves simply wiping two swabs along the inside of your cheeks and sending them to the lab, along with a questionnaire about your health and lifestyle choices. At the lab, the samples are bar-coded and DNA isolated from the swab. The DNA and questionnaire are analyzed to compile comprehensive personalized assessment and their specific nutraceutical formula.
When doing an analysis, we look specifically at certain genes as well as SNPs within a person's DNA. SNP (pronounced "snip") is an acronym for Single Nucleotide Polymorphism, which is a small genetic change, or variation, that can occur within a person's DNA sequence. While 99 percent of people's DNA is identical, SNPs are unique. The 0.1 % variations in sequence, however, produce the differences in phenotypes (hair and skin color, height, weight, etc.) and in an individual’s susceptibility to disease and health.
What Can Your Genes Tell You?
One of the promises of nutritional genomics is a set of dietary recommendations that leverage our understanding of nutrient-gene interaction, and how with dietary management and lifestyle changes, help manage a list of complex chronic diseases. The human genome project, coupled with the recent completion of the HapMap [a catalogue of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)5 within the genome], provides modern-day nutritionists with a knowledge base and a set of tools to explore nutrient-gene interaction. Initially the term nutritional genomics referred to the analysis of the effects of nutrients on gene expression; more recently the term has been expanded to include effects on proteins, metabolites, and pathways in a globally integrated model as a subset of nutritional genomics, nutrigenetics focuses on the effect of structural variations in genes, most commonly SNPs, in an effort to understand the highly variable response of humans to diet. In an ideal scenario, it may be possible to leverage our understanding of nutritional genomics to tailor diets to the genetic background of an individual to optimize health and offset disease. Our goal is to identify gene variants (alleles) that affect the occurrence of certain traits such as obesity, depression, or high blood pressure, which may increase the risk of certain diseases in later life, such as heart disease, diabetes, and dementia. Observable traits resulting from the interaction of genetic and environmental factors are called phenotypes. For example, one type of allele may be associated more with higher cholesterol levels than another allele is. Finding such associations and then describing how they affect a gene’s function move us a step closer to finding methods of disease prevention and cure.”
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