Study Finds Consumer DNA Tests Wrong 40 Percent Of The Time

Popular direct-to-consumer DNA kits that promise to reveal a person's heritage and details about their health provide false information to two in five users, a new study published in the journal Genetics in Medicine suggests. The troubling data comes from research conducted by medical diagnostics company Ambry Genetics. The researchers found that consumer DNA tests can often fall victim to false-positives that result in producing incorrect information. Consumer DNA tests like 23andMe, pictured, produce false-positives for two-in-five people. Consumer DNA tests often do not look at the entirety of an individual's genome. Instead, they use a technique that looks specifically for specific SNP arrays, which can determine certain pieces of information about an individual like a predisposition to a disease.