Survey of the training needs of genetic assistants supports the creation of genetic assistant training programs.

Despite the increasing numbers of genetic assistants (GAs) in the genomics workforce, their training needs and how to best prepare GAs for their role have not been well defined. We sought to identify the current educational status of GAs, opinions on their training needs, and attitudes about GA training programs (GATPs). Survey links were emailed to NSGC members, 17 state genetic counseling (GC) professional organizations, and genomic medicine researchers.

GA4GH: International policies and standards for data sharing across genomic research and healthcare.

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) aims to accelerate biomedical advances by enabling the responsible sharing of clinical and genomic data through both harmonized data aggregation and federated approaches. The decreasing cost of genomic sequencing (along with other genome-wide molecular assays) and increasing evidence of its clinical utility will soon drive the generation of sequence data from tens of millions of humans, with increasing levels of diversity. In this perspective, we present the GA4GH strategies for addressing the major challenges of this data revolution.

Association of twinning and maternal age with major structural birth defects in Utah, 1999 to 2008.

Background: Twinning is a risk factor for birth defects. Using population-based data from the Utah Birth Defect Network and the Utah Department of Health Vital Records, we investigated whether twinning increases the risk of major structural birth defects in live-born opposite-sex (OS) and same-sex (SS) twins as proxies for monozygotic and dizygotic twins, respectively. We also assessed whether maternal age modified the association between twinning and birth defects.