I've done 23andMe. I would never rely on its results for disease prediction. A lot of their results read like a fortune cookie anyway. But it was interesting to genetically verify my Ashkenazi Jewish heritage with a maternal haplotype that is traceable to a group from the middle east around the beginnings of Judeo-Christianity. This was awesome, considering I could only trace my roots back about four generations prior to 23andMe.
You shouldn't rely on the results, certainly, but I don't think they should be taken with a grain of salt. I would suggest the problem with most people (and I'm not claiming to know your background) is that they aren't familiar with the statistics used in reporting the risks. For 23andMe, these are basically just relative risk and absolute risk. But when you look at relative risk (I'm five times as likely to develop Type 1 diabetes), it's much more upsetting than the absolute risk (my risk is 5% over my lifetime instead of the usual 1%). I do think they try and mitigate it with their population pictures (100 figures and X many are colored in to show your likelihood) but I think that at the heart of it their user base (and the population at large) just doesn't really understand statistics well.
Comments
I've done 23andMe. I would never rely on its results for disease prediction. A lot of their results read like a fortune cookie anyway. But it was interesting to genetically verify my Ashkenazi Jewish heritage with a maternal haplotype that is traceable to a group from the middle east around the beginnings of Judeo-Christianity. This was awesome, considering I could only trace my roots back about four generations prior to 23andMe.
You shouldn't rely on the results, certainly, but I don't think they should be taken with a grain of salt. I would suggest the problem with most people (and I'm not claiming to know your background) is that they aren't familiar with the statistics used in reporting the risks. For 23andMe, these are basically just relative risk and absolute risk. But when you look at relative risk (I'm five times as likely to develop Type 1 diabetes), it's much more upsetting than the absolute risk (my risk is 5% over my lifetime instead of the usual 1%). I do think they try and mitigate it with their population pictures (100 figures and X many are colored in to show your likelihood) but I think that at the heart of it their user base (and the population at large) just doesn't really understand statistics well.