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DNA test to determine best sport for child
December 1, 2008
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NEW YORK TIMES
BOULDER, Colo.–When Donna Campiglia learned recently that a genetic test might be able to determine which sports suit the talents of her 2 1/2-year-old son Noah, she instantly said, "Where can I get it and how much does it cost?"
"I could see how some people might think the test would pigeonhole your child into doing fewer sports or being exposed to fewer things, but I still think it's good to match them with the right activity," Campiglia, 36, said as she watched a toddler class at Boulder Indoor Soccer, in which Noah struggled to take direction from the coach between juice and potty breaks.
In health-conscious, sports-oriented Boulder, Atlas Sports Genetics is playing into the obsessions of parents by offering a $149 (U.S.) test that aims to predict a child's natural athletic strengths. The process is simple. Swab inside the child's cheek and along the gums to collect the DNA and return it to a laboratory for analysis of ACTN3, one gene among more than 20,000 in the human genome.
The test's goal is to determine whether a person would be best at speed and power sports like sprinting or football, or endurance sports like distance running, or a combination of the two. A 2003 study discovered the link between ACTN3 and those athletic abilities.
In this era of genetic testing, DNA is being analyzed to determine predispositions to disease, but experts raise serious questions about marketing it as a first step in finding a child's sports niche, which some parents consider the road to a college scholarship or a career as a professional athlete.
Atlas executives acknowledge that their test has limitations but say that it could provide guidelines for placing youngsters in sports. The company is focused on testing children from infancy to about 8 years old because physical tests to gauge future sports performance at that age are, at best, unreliable.
Some experts say ACTN3 testing is in its infancy and virtually useless. Dr. Theodore Friedmann, director of the University of California-San Diego Medical Center's interdepartmental gene therapy program, called it "an opportunity to sell new versions of snake oil."
Toronto Star