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All athletes playing on college sports teams governed by the National College Athletic Association (NCAA) are required to confirm their Sickle Cell Trait (SCT) status by taking a blood test or by providing prior test results. This SNAPSHOT explores the history, successes, and limitations of this mandatory SCT screening program, which was put in place to allow student athletes with SCT to safely participate in sports.

Recent advances in genetics have yielded important insights into the etiology of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs). Professional societies such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics now recommend testing patients newly diagnosed with ASD and some other NDDs with chromosomal microarray analysis (CMA). CMA can identify alterations in the number of copies of various regions in the entire genome for the purposes of comparison with known normal and pathogenic patterns.

This lesson examines the many reasons a person may choose to learn about their genetic information. For some, a difficult-to-diagnose disease might be identified thanks to genetic testing, while others use genetics to inform what medicines might be most effective, or to learn about future generations. Students look at several different examples with the goal of considering different perspectives on the application of genetics in medicine.

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