In July 2012 God called me out of the natural health communities and he told me to seek Him for healing. I stopped all the research that I was doing to follow Him. My only hope for healing in my life is through faith in Jesus Christ.
I told people I'd let them know if 23andme ever did a sale, so as promised here we go!! Today I got an email giving $50 off, so that makes the kit out to $249 plus shipping. This code expires 11:59PM PDT, Sunday August 12, 2012.
The coupon code is:
VMQ6KG
There is no limit to the number of times the code can be used, so please feel free to pass this along to your own families, friends, co-workers. The more people we get tested at 23andme the more potential cousins we all get, so it's a win win for all of us!
Also this actually isn't too bad of a deal at all. It will only end up being about $40 more than what I paid when they used to do the $99 plus monthly subscription fee. In the long run, that's pretty negligible, so it's an excellent time to test family members we have all been putting off.
23andme was a Christmas gift from my mom (I asked her for it) and it has been really good for me. Using the different 3rd party tools available, it has helped me get some insight in my chronic health issues.
I no longer subscribe to this stuff, so everything has been deleted from my blog. Take care. If you want to know what I am doing now, then please see this video.
Since getting my results back from 23andme, I have been digging into my results looking for some clues or some ideas or things to look out for. One of the things that interested me were Dr. Yasko's methylation SNP's. Now that the cost of genetic testing is coming down each year, its popularity is increasing in the chronic illness communities.
Do the answers to our chronic health problems, lie within our genetics?
Update:
After some more research, I actually believe that 23andme does not call
this SNP properly and/or it does not actually correspond with HLA-B
1502. I guess I'd have to get tested elsewhere to know for sure, (but I have no intentions of doing that).
The
reason why I say this is because at one point in time Gedmatch.com
had a rareSNP finder and this one did not come up as "rare" for me. I
believe it showed frequencies all the way up to 20%. If more than 20% of people on Gedmatch shares this genotype, then it is quite common and could not possibly be accurate.
So I just wanted to throw that out there. All of my East Asian fell off of my Ancestry Composition when they updated it. So personally I think this SNP is not accurate and I would not be worried. If you are worried, then get tested at a lab for HLA-B 1502.
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I kind of left all of you hanging there with my last post. I decided instead of taking another week to get all of my research and thoughts together, I'd just let you know what I found out with this 1 particular genotype.
Genetics is very confusing and I don't even partially understand it, but as you all should know, there are very important markers within our genome for our immune system. These are called HLA or human leukocyte antigen. These are located on Chromosome 6 and are responsible for the way our immune system responds.
When I ordered 23andme genetic testing, I was looking for anything at all that might give me some insight into my health. Well I think as far as discoveries go, I probably hit the jackpot. When someone opens up their genetic information, most people want to be warned about potentially harmful conditions or to alert them of some sort of disease they are carry etc.
After I looked in the initial reports provided by 23andme, I wanted to go even further. I downloaded my genetic raw data to my computer and loaded it into a program called Promethease. This program is free (or you can pay a cheap $2 to speed up the test) and it will alert you to any mutations or genotypes they feel are important.
In the "Bad section" I found something that had an extremely low frequency, high magnitude and seemed like it should have had a huge sign that said, HOLY SH*T READ ME, but it did not. Thankfully I was paying very close attention...
According to this test I carry what is called HLA-B*1502. People with this allele have a 1000 fold increased risk of developing Stevens Johnson Syndrome (remember me talking about this while chelating?) when taking carbamazepine, phenytoin and fosphenytoin. These are anti-epileptics drugs, but they also have other uses. Here's where it gets really weird though. If you look up any information on this it only talks about this occurring in Asians. Well I'm not Asian, so I was pretty perplexed by this. The frequency for this allele to occur in a Caucasian is 0.0-0.1%. Yes that is 0.1%.
You can watch a short video from the FDA alerting people of this.
On 23andme I made a thread about my finding and some were suggesting that since I wasn't an Asian that this did not apply to me. I challenged this theory. No Caucasians were ever seen with this allele in any literature (Study 1,Study 2, Study 3 or Study 4) Therefore one cannot make the assumption that it would be safe to take these drugs. The only thing these studies were trying to show were that there are other HLA-B genotypes which have a higher prevalence in the Caucasian population which were causing CBZ-SJS.
Out of curiosity, I emailed one of the authors of the study and asked him if me (a Caucasian) would have the same risk as an Asian and he said Yes. I should avoid both carbamazepine and phenytoin.
Are there any other Caucasians out there with HLA-B*1502? Part of me wants to get this checked through Quest Diagnostic or Lab Corp to confirm I do in fact have this...When you come across something like this, I need further proof.There is an entry in snpedia that testing for this may not be accurate because it is phased data.
The defining SNP's (said "snips") are:
rs3909184 GG
rs2844682 AA
The first one GG is common. It is the second one at AA that is rare in Europeans. You need to have both of these in order to have HLA-B*1502. This association with HLA-B*1502, CBZ and Stevens Johnson Syndrome is well documented. If for some reason I would have ever needed an anti-epileptic, I never would have refused either of these two drugs.
Stevens Johnson Syndrome is serious business and it either kills you or leaves you in so much pain with health problems for the rest of your life. Some of the saddest videos I've ever seen on Youtube are of those people with Stevens Johnson Syndrome. They will break your heart...
I plan on making a huge report of everything I found out both on my blog and in a youtube video. I found out some unbelievable things which I cannot wait to report to all of you.
Was it worth it? Absolutely. It might have saved my life....
For Christmas I asked for 23andMe's genetic testing available for $99 plus a 12 year subscription to their service. I was so happy to see my mom handed me the money to get it done and today I collected my saliva sample and have shipped it out.
The results will take 6-8 weeks, but I hope it gets here sooner. I am soo damn excited it is not even funny. This test will let me know A TON of things. It will take me weeks, if not months to sort through all of the raw data included, but that's ok. I have a lot of time on my hands. One really good test now available in the latest (V3) chip of 23andMe is APO E. They now test to see if you have APO e3/e4. This shows your body's ability to detox and those with APO E4 have an increased risk of Alzheimer's and it has also been found in children with Autism.
Looking around online, it also tests a lot of Amy Yasko's methylation pathway SNP's as well as DBH SNP for genetic POTS.
Finding out my APO E is well worth the $99 and I'll get so much more out of it.
