Genetic Counseling

My MATERNAL grandmother had Alzheimer's disease. Before she died, she forgot our names, our faces and, eventually, how to speak and think. But my grandfather's heartbreak was the most painful to witness. I remember watching the two of them on the sofa together in the months before she died. My grandfather, a sometimes severe man not overly disposed to expressions of tender emotion, cooed into my grandmother's ear: "My bride, oh my bride. I love you. Do you hear me? I love you."

Will genome scan services improve people's health -- or not? So far, the limited evidence on behaviors after genetic testing has yielded mixed results. For example, a 1997 study on 426 smokers conducted at Georgetown University Medical Center found that giving smokers information on their genetic risk of lung cancer upped the motivation to quit -- but a year afterward they were no more likely to have quit smoking than people who received more general counseling.

Testing five genes in tumors might help doctors determine which patients with lung cancer are likely to fare best after surgery and which need the strongest treatments, according to a new study. A five-gene test distinguished patients who would survive almost 3 1/2 years after diagnosis from those who would live about half as long, said researchers led by Pan-Chyr Yang, an oncologist at National Taiwan University Hospital in Taipei, in last week's New England Journal of Medicine.

Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, widely touted as a way to help older women undergoing in vitro fertilization achieve a higher birth rate, actually reduces births by a third, Dutch researchers reported Wednesday. The finding represents a major setback for the procedure, which involves removing a single cell from a 3-day-old embryo to look for potential birth defects.

Thirty-five years after genetic screening was first used to identify babies at risk of being born with debilitating diseases, a new study of a potentially serious but treatable illness among Ashkenazi Jews questions whether such testing has gone too far. One-quarter of fetuses found to have Gaucher disease were aborted over an eight-year period, even though half of all children with the metabolic disorder will never experience any symptoms, such as pain, organ enlargement and anemia.

Breast CANCER has crept its way through Lisa Lujan's life like an insidious, destructive weed. Her oldest sister was diagnosed at age 35 and again at 50. Her mother was diagnosed at age 72 and had a mastectomy. Her second sister was diagnosed at age 44 and died in 2005 at age 48. Over the years, seven relatives on both her mother's and father's sides of the family have been stricken with breast cancer.

The particulars of Alexandra Gammelgard's egg donations are a bit of a blur to her. Between the ages 18 and 21, she donated to at least four infertile couples, using two, maybe three, agencies that paid her from $5,000 to $15,000 for each donation. She was trying to pay for her education at UC San Diego and didn't keep track of the details. "The college years of your life go by so fast, and you do so many crazy, random things that it's hard to remember it all," Gammelgard, now 23, says.

The cherry-red spots on the baby boy's retina told a tale of genetic catastrophe: Conner Hopf, 11 months old, almost surely will not live to see his fifth birthday. Before he dies, he's likely to go blind, lose much of his hearing and become unable to move. He has a rare degenerative disease known as Tay-Sachs, which once principally struck children of Eastern or Central European Jewish heritage.

Like most parents, Leilani Duff's mother and father say they want the best for their little girl, who celebrated her first birthday last week. But had they known what risks she faced in life, the child might never have been born. The Yorba Linda parents are suing their obstetrician, Dr.

A small California company made headway Friday in the race to develop commercial applications stemming from human genome research. Genomic Health Inc. of Redwood City reported that in two studies its genetic test for women with early breast cancer pinpointed which patients were most likely to benefit from chemotherapy, as well as which ones were most likely to relapse after surgery.