According to the company press release:
AncestryHealth Core is a first step on the journey of understanding how family heritage and genetics can impact health and wellness. It covers a set of curated, common ‘need to know’ health conditions and includes printable family health history and lab reports people can share with their healthcare provider. The physician-ordered laboratory test included in AncestryHealth Core uses genotyping array technology to detect genetic differences and deliver personalized reports related to health conditions such as heart disease, hereditary cancers, blood-related disorders, and risks for carrier status of health conditions, such as Tay-Sachs disease. Additionally, there are wellness reports on topics such as nutrition and metabolism. AncestryHealth Core is priced at $149 and includes AncestryDNA. Existing AncestryDNA customers can upgrade to AncestryHealth Core for $49.
Starting next year AncestryHealth Plus will use next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology to deliver more comprehensive screening data, providing both greater coverage of DNA differences for each condition and more risk categories such as those related to potentially developing heart disease, cancers, and disorders related to blood, the nervous system and connective tissues. For new customers, AncestryHealth Plus with NGS technology has a $199 activation fee, which includes the first six months of membership with an additional $49 membership fee every six months. Existing AncestryDNA customers can upgrade to AncestryHealth Plus for an initial payment of $49. The ongoing membership will include quarterly screening updates, more educational resources and enhanced tools for family health history and healthcare provider collaboration.
Comment: Ancestry is re-entering this field, there was an earlier iteration in July 2015. It's an active area. 23andMe, the original in DNA/Health DTC service, announced an upgrade in August. MyHeritage announced its Health + Ancestry test in May and the acquisition of SNPedia and Promethease in September.
Despite being late to the party Ancestry has demonstrated, after entering autosomal DNA testing service for genealogy late, that it can catch up and surpass the others. Ancestry is also being cautious to keep on the right side of US regulatory authorities which was a problem for 23andMe.
UPDATE: Ancestry provided the following information on how the NGS results differ from those used in the regular "Array" test by Ancestry.
“The NGS technology will check for changes in at least 100 times as many locations in your DNA as the Array does. With Array we look at a few (10-20) specific bases within a gene to see any changes that are known to increase risk of disease. In NGS, we can look at the entire gene – which on average includes 1000 to 2000 bases – and can see many more changes. We then determine if those changes increase risk for disease.
One analogy is, with Array, we can read a few critical letters in a sentence. With NGS, we can read every letter of the entire sentence, greatly increasing the likelihood of identifying a variation.”
Ancestry knows enough about you already. If it's a burning desire to know health history use promethease. Much cheaper and you get hundreds of pages of information.
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