Anne Wojcicki Quotes

Genes work with probabilities; they don't work with certainties. So most things that you're looking at with these genetic tests, it's not like you're condemned to automatically get the disease or the syndrome. There's a lot of factors in play there.

Is there something in my genetic makeup that makes me more at risk for heart disease? I believe there is. My father was the sign.

A lot of people don't want to know, but I'd like to know if I have a 10 percent or a 90 percent chance of developing Alzheimer's some day. If I know I'm likely to develop it, I'm certainly going to start looking around right now to find if there is something that I can do to offset it.

If your DNA profile puts you at a higher risk of developing obesity, that doesn't mean it's your fate. You can take control of the environmental side of the equation and reduce your overall lifetime risk by a lot.

My wife and I had been to the genetic counselor; my wife is not Jewish - she's the shiksha goddess type - and was negative for everything. But I was positive. I carried the gene for three genetic disorders, which, if she had been positive for, we would have passed down to the child.

In a prime-time address, President Bush said he backed limited federal funding for stem cell research. That's right, the President said, this is a quote, the research could help cure brain diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and whatever it is I have.

Another interesting field, which is my own, is cofactors, not only to the disease but also to transmission. I am still puzzled by the fact that you get more sexual transmission in some ethnic populations. One way to answer this is to look for genetic factors.

The bottom line is that this author, a practicing neurologist dealing with Alzheimer's disease on a daily basis, believes we need to expand the public awareness that modifiable lifestyle factors have a profound role to play in determining who will or won't get this disease.

The fact that I have a risk genetically for Alzheimer's and blindness is not great news. But the reality is that any one of us will have dozens of these risks, and what we have to learn is how to deal with them.

Even slight elevations in blood sugar have been shown to increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease.

My own area of expertise is the genetics of human disease. I was fortunate to be part of the team that found the genes for cystic fibrosis, and Huntington's disease and neurofibromatosis.

Many people assume the diseases that kill us are pre-programmed into our genes. High blood pressure by 55, heart attacks at 60, maybe cancer at 70, and so on... But for most of the leading causes of death, our genes usually account for only 10-20 per cent of risk.

Many health organizations discourage patients from learning their ApoE genotype. They warn that people may not be able to cope with bad news or will misinterpret the results.

I've come to the conclusion that you shouldn't have to see a genetic counselor. It should be a choice.

Genes are thought to contribute a certain amount to the cause of autism but it's not 100 per cent. It might be about 60 per cent genetic. So there are going to be environmental factors that mediate the impact of autism.

People's genes can say a great deal about their health. There are genes that reveal an increased likelihood of getting cancer, heart disease or Alzheimer's.

[The tests agreed] that I was at higher risk than the average person for Type 2 diabetes, which is what my lab works on. In fact, some of the things they were testing for were variants that we had discovered.

If you want to lower your risk of Parkinson's disease, caffeine is protective to some extent; nobody knows why. Head injuries are bad for you. They lead to Parkinson's disease.

Although there have been warnings that it was coming for years, the Alzheimer's epidemic is here now and millions more families will be touched by this progressive - and ultimately fatal - disease unless its course can be altered.

Medicine has been successful by treating diseases in a very specific way once the damage is done. But telomere length integrates a lot of factors together and gives you an overall picture of risk for what is now emerging as a lot of diseases that tend to occur together, such as diabetes and heart disease.

I can't say when we will have a cure, but we now know through our findings how to ask the question of what is going wrong at the earliest stage of Alzheimer's.

It may act as an ancillary factor, but by itself, the mutation in tau doesn't give you Alzheimer's disease. This is not to say the tau is not very important. It may be important in propagating the disorder from one cell to another. But as a causal mechanism, the evidence is strongest for beta amyloid abnormalities.

Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it's not a disease itself.

Each form of Alzheimer's disease should perturb different brain networks and so influence the concentration of different proteins that can be measured in the blood.

I have had my genome fully sequenced and have learned a great deal about which medications I would respond to and which might or would induce major side effects, along with knowing many medical conditions for which I'm particularly susceptible.