In dire need of a crash course!

It’s not always immediately self-obvious, so no need for self-deprecation!

Generally speaking, yes, the Green-highlighted SNPs are those that are “normal”, i.e. they aren’t the variant “spellings”. The red ones mean there is homozygosity for the variant genotype; and in most cases diseases are linked (statistically) to the variant genotypes.

You don’t need to become a geneticist (I certainly am not!) but the more you become familiar with the genomic lexicon and about how the genomic database is built, of course the better able you’ll be to apply that knowledge.

There are other tools you can employ, with minimal cost. I personally recommend taking the raw data you uploaded to Livewello, and uploading it also to Promethease.com. You then get a downloadable xml-based report that you can run at any time on your pc. While it will base much of its analysis of your genome on the SNPedia database, (just as Livewello does), unlike the latter, it allows for filtering for specific health / disease conditions, or for specific Genes. This can be a good complement to Livewello, which allows you to check just by specific SNP.

One thing I’ll mention at this point is that you’ll occasionally note that Promethease (and others) may identify your genotype differently for various gene SNPs than you’ll see on Livewello. That is because the “build” of the human genome changes periodically, and the direction in which the nucelotides (base pairs) that code the particular SNP may be on one report different, i.e. the reverse of, what is found in the other. For example, my observation is that Livewello typically reports the positive “plus” strand direction, while the “negative” direction spelling may be reflected in the information that Promethease (and maybe SNPedia) presents.

I wrote a bit more about this here: SNPs with GG but Outcome should be CC . As I explained there, this is a lay-person’s understanding… subject to review & correction by someone more knowledgeable.

One last thing I’d like to point out. It may go without saying to you but many people, seeing that they have a heterozygous or homozygous allele that’s associated with a disease condition, may deduce that they have that disease. I suspect you already know this, but it does not, in most cases mean that. If you read carefully, it just means that the allele in question has been associated (usually by statistical analysis in various disease / health studies) with a condition, meaning there is an increased (or decreased) likelihood.

Predisposition is NOT destiny. As epigenetics is showing, behavioral & environmental influences (diet, exercise, exposures to various agents, our emotional states, stresses, etc. etc. have a direct bearing on whether and how genes express - and whether or not we get the diseases for which we may have inherited certain tendencies.

The discovery of various pre-disposing gene SNPs does give us an advantage in that we can possibly head off problems - with specific strategies, such as supplementation with or avoiding certain elements. I have already done a bit of that with the help of looking at specific SNPs associated with metabolic (methylation, folate pathways, for example). Between that information and a knowledgeable doctor, I’ve been able to reduce a blood marker strongly associated .with the clotting disorder that I have.

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