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TwitThisAt-Home Testing
Want to know your cholesterol level? Think you might have a food allergy? Worried about colon cancer or kidney disease? In the privacy of your home, you can now test yourself with a wide range of medical tests and devices that used to be available only through physicians. So, in addition to pregnancy, blood pressure or glucose testing, you can screen for glaucoma and other vision problems (keepyoursight.com; $29.95), or even get a StressCheck kit to measure levels of DHEA and cortisol in your saliva (not FDA approved).Home diagnostic tests have become a $1.5 billion-a-year industry in the United States. Driving the boom are customers like Kelly Gross of Lafayette, Indiana, who recently used a cotton swab to collect skin cells from the inside of her cheek, then sent the sample to DNA Direct to be checked for an inherited blood-clotting disorder called Factor V Leiden. (This San Francisco-based company, dnadirect.com, also offers infertility screening, and tests for genetic diseases, including some cancers.)
"I liked being able to test myself at home, with no needles," says Gross, whose 20-year-old daughter was diagnosed with the disorder last year. "Finding out that I had one mutated gene helps explain the past, such as why I lost a newborn because of blood supply problems in 1994. It also will help keep me healthy in the future, since I've learned that sitting for long periods on a plane, or using hormone replacement therapy after menopause, could put me at high risk for clots."
However, experts see possible perils in at-home testing. Some tests sold online, including at least one that purports to detect HIV infection, lack FDA approval. (To avoid scams, search the OTC database at www.fda.gov, using the name of the test or its manufacturer.) Another problem is that without a doctor, you won't know what to do if the results are abnormal, says Vicki Rackner, MD, clinical instructor at University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. "I got a frantic call from a woman who ordered her own blood tests and was told she needed to go to the emergency room because her potassium level was so high that she might have heart trouble. But I knew she'd probably left the tourniquet on too long, which can give a misleading result. She was scared half to death, when all she needed was a repeat test."
When that test was normal, Dr. Rackner reviewed the rest of the results. Another problem immediately jumped out. "Because this woman had seen a TV show about diabetes, she'd gotten tested for that, but hadn't ordered a thyroid function test, which is very important for a woman her age. So her blood sugar was fine, but she'd missed her real problem: a thyroid disorder that wasn't causing symptoms yet."
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