The announcement at the 22nd annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (Prague, Czech Republic; June 18-21, 2006) of a new method for preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) for familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) raises many ethical and clinical questions. PGD has potential benefits for the detection of genetic disorders that manifest themselves at birth or in early childhood, or for highly-penetrant monogenic disorders such as Huntingdon's disease, but is the use of such a test to predict risk of developing a disease that might not appear until adulthood and that has multifactorial causes pushing the boundaries of preventive medicine too far?
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