People have known for decades the impact that family inheritance has on a person’s health. Diabetes, schizophrenia, and Parkinson’s Disease are all disorders that have been linked to genetic inheritance. Now it is possible to get your genome read through a gene therapy company in order to find out information that can help treat or even prevent you from inheriting a disease that your family has carried in its gene pool for generations.

The process is called genome mapping, and it is a simple blood test that can provide geneticists an ‘image’ of your gene. Some mutations, like the one for Huntington’s Disease, are easy to spot and can indicate the you will in fact be afflicted with the disorder in your future. Other mutations can give a woman an idea of her chances of getting ovarian cancer. While it doesn’t always help to know that you will someday face a terrible disease, the knowledge can help you plan for the future more effectively. In the case of Diabetes, knowing that you are susceptible to the disease can help you to make better eating choices.

For as little as a thousand dollars, you can have blood drawn at your local doctor’s office and shipped to a genome sequencing company. Geneticists decode the nearly 6 billion letters of DNA and provide clues about your chemical makeup.