Future Now
The IFTF Blog
New Health Anxieties?
A somewhat surprising study from the New England Journal of Medicine shows that telling people that they have a significantly higher genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease does not seem to cause any added anxiety, depression or other psychological concerns. The findings seem to fly in the face of what a number of researchers--myself included--have thought of as a major concern with genetic risk testing, which is that people would get anxious knowing that they had a high chance for developing a particular, deadly disease and no real way of preventing it.In speaking with The Technology Review, Colleen McBride, chief of the Social and Behavioral Research Branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute, notes:
The findings may help us to subdue paternalistic concerns that we have to protect people from this information...People given the option to take these tests can protect themselves, and they find it useful to know the results, even if the test hasn't been proven to make a difference in what they do.
"What they do" with the results, as McBride puts it, is an intriguing, if less explored question in the study. McBride notes that in a study she conducted on genetic risk for lung cancer among smokers, high-risk and low-risk patients showed no difference in their level of interest in quitting smoking, though she thinks that a genetic test might help push someone toward enrolling in a smoking cessation class. In the Alzheimer's study, those at higher-risk of the disease started taking vitamins more frequently, which as the study's lead researcher Robert Green notes, could be potentially problematic if people start sinking time and money into unregulated dietary supplements.That said, a couple caveats in the Alzheimer's study: It was small (fewer than 200 people participated), the participants were pre-screened to filter out anyone at risk for anxiety or depression, and participants received genetic counseling to help understand their test results. In real world use, genetic counseling may not always be available. And it's hard to imagine keeping testing out of the hands of anyone with a greater psychological risk of anxiety.