Health Inspectors

Matching with relatives.

Discovering your ethnic background. Solving genealogical questions. We frequently discuss these benefits of having your DNA tested, but another use comes up less often in genealogy circles: learning about your health. Along with ancestral information, your genes contain data that impacts your predisposition towards various health conditions, plus hints about how your body will respond to foods, sleep, exercise and more.

Health results are an increasingly important focus for commercial DNA tests. For years, 23andMe <www.23andme.com> was the dominant player in this field, providing both genealogical and health-related DNA results. But other companies are catching up, with three of the other “Big Five” testing companies offering such tests: AncestryDNA <www.ancestry.com/dna>, Living DNA <www.livingdna.com> and MyHeritage DNA <www.myheritage.com/dna>. (As of writing, the fifth “Big Five” testing company, Family Tree DNA <www.familytreedna.com>, doesn’t o.er health-related testing.)

With all these new options, which DNA test is best for health-related information? I’ve tested at the four major players, and in this article I’ll share the features, pros, and cons of each.

THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH DNA

Before we look at the tests in detail, let’s have a quick primer on genetic genealogy and what these commercial tests look for.

First, some terminology: Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, each of which contains many genes. A gene is a segment of DNA that contains coded instructions about how a cell operates.

Humans share some DNA with all living organisms (even other animals, such as cats and dogs). In fact, humans—as different as we sometimes seem from each other—share 99.5% of DNA with . The genes that make up that 0.5% difference account for all