Public release date: 17-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Rebecca Hughes hughes.r@ghc.org 206-287-2055 Group Health Research Institute

SEATTLEPeople have more and more chances to participate in genetic testing that can indicate their range of risk for developing a disease. Receiving these results does not appreciably drive up or diminishtest recipients' demand for potentially costly follow-up health services, according to a new study in the May 17, 2012 early online issue of Genetics in Medicine.

The study was done by researchers with the Multiplex Initiative, a multi-center collaborative initiative involving investigators from the National Institutes of Health's Intramural Research Program, Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, and the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit.

The tests are available from a growing number of commercial producers, and health care providers have been uncertain whether people who received information only about risk would follow up by demanding diagnostic testing to check for predicted illnesses.

The study is the first to use electronic health recordsrather than self-reported behaviorto measure the impact of genetic testing on the subsequent use of health services by commercially insured, healthy adults. Self-reports, which can be affected by memory lapses and other problems, tend to be less accurate.

"Our study was a best-case scenario, because we chose 15 genes reliably associated with relatively small risks for eight common diseases that health behaviors can affect," said the study's first author Robert J. Reid, MD, PhD. Dr. Reid is Group Health's associate medical director of research translation and an associate investigator at Group Health Research Institute. Those diseases were type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, high blood cholesterol, hypertension, osteoporosis, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, and melanoma. "We hope that testing positive activates patients to make behavior changes that could lower their risk, such as quitting smoking," he added, "without causing them to make many extra visits to their doctors."

"Understanding personalized genetic information is important because it is becoming more readily available and we need to figure out how to integrate it effectively and efficiently into the clinical care we provide," said coauthor Eric B. Larson, MD, MPH, Group Health Cooperative's vice president for research and Group Health Research Institute's executive director.

"There are a lot of unanswered questions about how genetic test results can be used to guide people toward making positive lifestyle and health behavior changes," said Colleen McBride, PhD, chief of the Social and Behavioral Research Branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). "This study goes a long way toward bringing data to these debates and shows that people are not likely to make inappropriate demands of health delivery systems if they are properly informed about the limitations of genetic tests."

Genetic tests, such as those used in this study, can detect common variants of genes associated with modest changes in the chances of developing particular diseases. "Multiplex" means simultaneously performing many genetic tests on one blood sample.

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Genetic testing may not trigger more use of health services

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