What are the symptoms? They usually begin with tingling, numbness or prickling in your toes or fingers. This numbness may spread up to your hands or feet and feel like burning, freezing, throbbing and/or shooting pain that is often worse at night. Your pain may come and go or it may be constant.
How DNA Testing Is Done. To do a DNA test, a sample of your cells is required. This sample can be from your blood, saliva, skin cells or even the inside of your cheek. Usually, DNA test samples are taken by a doctor or clinic and sent away to a specialized genetic testing lab where the DNA is separated out from your cells. For a blood test, a needle and syringe would be required to draw a sample of blood. For the saliva sample, you would spit into a tube. For the cheek swap, scraping the inside of your cheek with a large cotton swab should do the job.
What happens to DNA evidence? Once DNA is collected, there is a protocol for how the evidence is handled and used in an investigation. The evidence will be provided to law enforcement who may send it to a crime lab. The lab will analyze the material and develop DNA profiles that are unique to a specific person. The lab works with law enforcement officials to compare these profiles to the DNA of potential suspects. If the perpetrator is unknown, they may compare the DNA profile against a large database run by the FBI called CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System.