It’s written all over your face
JOEL SARTORE/Nat. Geo In what sounds like a breakthrough in the diagnosis of genetic disorders, British scientists announced this week that they would be able to forgo expensive genetic testing in favor of simply looking at patients’ faces for signs of disorders like Asperger’s, fragile X syndrome, and others. Hundreds of documented genetic disorders result ...
JOEL SARTORE/Nat. Geo
In what sounds like a breakthrough in the diagnosis of genetic disorders, British scientists announced this week that they would be able to forgo expensive genetic testing in favor of simply looking at patients’ faces for signs of disorders like Asperger’s, fragile X syndrome, and others.
Hundreds of documented genetic disorders result in subtle alterations to facial features. Doctors, using 3D mapping imagery for a handful of these, will be able to spot tell-tale features in patients as young as two years old. One of the disorders they’ve been able to map is Williams syndrome, which causes those afflicted to be uncommonly friendly toward strangers and was the subject of a fascinating NYT Magazine piece this summer. Williams is “characterized by a short, upturned nose and a small jaw,” and with the new facial mapping program, doctors were able to accurately diagnose 98 percent of cases.
There will no doubt be some who call this phrenology for the 21st century. But with 25,000 different facial points mapped on each child for comparison, the new technology hardly sounds like the pseudoscience of yore. What’s crucially important for the testing—if it indeed is as accurate as is being claimed—is that children can be diagnosed younger and at far lower costs.
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