About our tests – overview

deCODE’s tests are DNA-based reference laboratory tests for assessing the genetic contribution to individual risk of common diseases.

Common diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and the most common forms of cancer, arise as a result of the confluence of both genetic and environmental and lifestyle risk factors. With the discovery of major genetic risk factors over the past few years, deCODE has developed tests to detect this risk and to bring that information together with the assessment of standard risk factors in clinical practice.

With the most personalized and complete picture of susceptibility to conditions such as type 2 diabetes, atrial fibrillation, heart attack and certain cancers, physicians can provide their patients more targeted screening, earlier intervention and prevention.

deCODE’s leadership in genetics enables us to provide tests that are comprehensive, up-to-date, and easily brought into daily clinical practice – detecting all of the validated genetic risk markers relevant to your patient with results seamlessly integrated with the risk measurements you already use.

All the markers in deCODE tests and scans have been associated with risk of disease and replicated in large-scale, published case-control studies in cohorts from multiple populations studies.

What deCODE’s tests measure

deCODE’s tests detect risk – the results are probabilistic, very much as, as for example, blood lipid tests are predictive of cardiovascular disease.

deCODE’s tests measure the relative risk associated with the genetic markers tested and thus are largely independent of other risk factors the patients may have, such as family history or serum markers or lifestyle factors that are also associated with risk of a given disease.

This is why our test results can be so easily and usefully brought into clinical practice. Because they are largely independent of other risk factors, they can either stand alone as a measure of the likelihood of an individual developing a disease, or be used to modify the patient’s risk as assessed by conventional risk assessment tools. So, for example, the results of our MI test can be multiplied by a patient’s ten year Framingham risk score for a more comprehensive assessment of risk of health attack; the same can be done with our BreastCancer test and Gail scores.

What deCODE’s tests are not

deCODE’s genetic risk tests are neither deterministic of future certainty of developing disease, as carrier-status tests for Mendelian genetic variants often are, nor are they diagnostic tests in the sense of conventional tests that diagnose the presence of a disease.

A high risk result from a deCODE test does not mean the patient is destined to have or develop the disease, and a low risk result does not mean the patient is without risk for the disease. In this sense, the deCODE risk tests are much like LDL-cholesterol and PSA, tagging risk for but not certainty of cardiovascular disease and prostate cancer, respectively.

This content was last reviewed on January 25, 2011.