Dr Robin Cotton and Dr Andy Hopwood discuss the role of DNA testing in relation to inherited diseases

Andy:
It's not my expertise at all but I know that the medical profession is asked to identify genes that they believe are responsible for certain diseases. Certainly in the past few years they've identified genes that are responsible for breast cancer.

Robin:
If you've identified a gene for a disease, and it's an inheritable disease, then a young couple could be tested to see if they're carriers of a disease and if they are, they could decide whether they wanted to have children or whether to try to adopt children.

So it can be used to prevent, in the future, inherited diseases by having prospective parents know whether or not they could have children to which they would be passing on a disease.

The best example of this is a disease called "cystic fibrosis" which is a disease of the lungs. And they spent years figuring out what gene it is. And now they can test for that gene and tell parents whether they would be a carrier of that gene. So if the parents have maybe had one child that's affected they can decide whether or not they want to try and have any other children or not. And that's becoming more and more common to be able to test for genetic disease.