Ethical and Legal Problems of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing: Can Legal Boundaries Be Set for a Borderless Medicine?

Abstract

Advances in genetics, particularly in their practical application to health care, have created new possibilities in the fight against disease, especially in relation to early and predictive diagnosis. These developments offer significant benefits, but they also generate new ethical and legal dilemmas and conflicts. Among the most salient are those raised by so-called direct-to-consumer genetic tests, which appear to promote greater citizen empowerment through increased access to personal health information. However, this purported empowerment may conceal decisions that are not truly autonomous, due to the lack of reliable information about the clinical validity and utility of such tests. That context, however, may be changing with the growing use of polygenic studies.