There are tools to quantify and measure your sleep, exercise, and diet. What about how your genetics impacts your family’s health risks?
An era of capturing individualized health data
Your body is unique. Humans are complex organisms comprised of many interconnected systems that can vary a lot from person to person.
The traditional practice of medicine has been historically symptom-based, reactionary, and reductionist. It does not fully capture your biology from all angles.
Thanks to better technologies and large-scale research efforts, there are now increasingly good tools to help us better understand your unique health profile and the molecular basis of optimal health versus dysfunction. People have begun to define health not simply as the absence of disease but also as a state of functioning at their best through individualized data and real-time feedback.
While there is no single measurement that will comprehensively capture your overall health and foreseeable health risks, there are now tools to help you measure and quantify blood and hormone levels (InsideTracker, Modern Fertility), sleep (Oura, Eight Sleep), exercise (Fitbit, Apple Watch), and diet (Zoe, Levels).
These tools have allowed people to discover how their everyday choices can impact their health. But what about measuring and quantifying your family’s genetic risks?
Up until now, there hasn’t been a way to quantify how your genetics impacts your family’s risk for the most common chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. There was simply no visibility as to the starting baseline genetic risk you can pass on to your future child.
This makes the future filled with uncertainties — especially for parents-to-be who know about a disease that runs in their family, such as Type 1 Diabetes, but previously had no way of quantifying the genetic component of their family’s risk.
Orchid helps remove some of the guesswork around genomic health
Most diseases have a genetic component — meaning that a person’s genetic makeup can influence their chance of developing disease. With Orchid, you can measure and quantify the level of genetic risk you can pass onto your child.
Just as people track their sleep, exercise, and diet, it’s critical to uncover what’s in the starting hand of cards we were dealt by way of our unique genetic makeup. Knowing your genetic vulnerabilities allows you to focus on offsetting potential risks with things you can control. And specifically, we provide you with this information during one of the most significant events in your life — having a baby.
While some consumer genetic tests such as 23andMe focus on providing ancestry and health wellness traits for personal curiosity, Orchid focuses on helping couples proactively build healthier families. The Couple Report helps answer questions like, “how likely is my future child going to develop common diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, based on my partner and I’s combined genetics?” and, “what can I do to reduce my future child’s health risks?”
Add to your “health optimization toolkit” and find out your family’s genetic risk to the 10 top chronic diseases. Start your Orchid journey today.
