AN APP A DAY MAY HELP KEEP THE DOCTOR AWAY

A Scripps Research team has developed a smartphone app called MyGeneRank that can calculate users’ genetic risk for coronary artery disease. The research team found people who used it and had high-risk scores were much more likely to start using statins or other cholesterol-lowering therapies, compared to those with low-risk scores. “We saw about twice the rate of statin initiation in the high genetic risk group vs the low genetic risk group, which indicates strategies like this could make a big contribution to public health,” says study senior author Ali Torkamani, professor and director of Genomics and Genome Informatics at the Scripps Research Translational Institute.