A Systematic Review of the Impact of Genetic Counseling on Risk Perception Accuracy
- PDF / 230,359 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 38 Downloads / 162 Views
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
A Systematic Review of the Impact of Genetic Counseling on Risk Perception Accuracy Chris M. R. Smerecnik & Ilse Mesters & Eline Verweij & Nanne K. de Vries & Hein de Vries
Received: 9 June 2008 / Accepted: 10 December 2008 / Published online: 17 March 2009 # The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract This review presents an overview of the impact of genetic counseling on risk perception accuracy in papers published between January 2000 and February 2007. The results suggest that genetic counseling may have a positive impact on risk perception accuracy, though some studies observed no impact at all, or only for low-risk participants. Several implications for future research can be deduced. First, future researchers should link risk perception changes to objective risk estimates, define risk perception accuracy as the correct counseled risk estimate, and report both the proportion of individuals who correctly estimate their risk and the average overestimation of the risk. Second, as the descriptions of the counseling sessions were generally poor, future research should include more detailed description of these sessions and link their content to risk perception outcomes to allow interpretation of the results. Finally, the effect of genetic counseling should be examined for a wider variety of hereditary conditions. Genetic counselors should provide the necessary context in which counselees can understand risk information, use both verbal and numerical risk estimates to communicate personal risk information, and use visual aids when communicating numerical risk information. Keywords Genetic counseling . Risk perception . Systematic review
C. M. R. Smerecnik (*) : I. Mesters : E. Verweij : N. K. de Vries : H. de Vries School for Public Health and Primary Care (Caphri), Department of Health Education and Health Promotion, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Science, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, 6200 Maastricht, MD, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]
Introduction Recent advances in genetic research have enabled us to identify individuals at risk for a wide variety of medical conditions due to their genetic makeup (Collins et al. 2003). At the same time, these advances have created the need to educate and guide these individuals (Lerman et al. 2002). Informing them of their hereditary risk and of the options for how to deal with this risk is the primary aim of genetic services (Wang et al. 2004). Genetic services involve both genetic counseling and genetic testing; of these, genetic counseling in particular aims to enable at-risk individuals to accurately identify, understand and adaptively cope with their genetic risk (Biesecker 2001; Pilnick & Dingwall 2001). The National Society of Genetic Counselors’ (NSGC) Task Force defines genetic counseling as “the process of helping people understand and adapt to medical, psychological, and familial applications of genetic contributions to disease” (Resta et al. 2006, p. 79). As such, g
Data Loading...
