By Rebecca Voelker
News@JAMA
Originally posted May 9, 2013
Recent recommendations that advise laboratories and physicians how to tell patients about incidental findings in genetic tests contradict ethical clinical practice, according to bioethicists at Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics in California.
A working group convened by the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) released recommendations in March saying that clinical DNA sequencing laboratories should test for a list of specific genetic abnormalities regardless of the clinical reason for testing and report the results to the patient’s physician. In turn, the recommendations say physicians have a responsibility to give patients all the findings, even if patients don’t want results that aren’t relevant to the condition for which they were tested.
The ACMG recommends that patients who undergo genome sequencing be tested for conditions including various forms of cancer, cardiomyopathy, and familial hypercholesterolemia in addition to their primary medical condition.
Recommending that patients not be able to choose whether they want to receive incidental findings, even when test results suggest adult-onset conditions in children, “contradicts ethical clinical practice in general,” wrote bioethicists Megan Allyse, PhD, and Marsha Michie, PhD, in the journal Trends in Biotechnology.
The entire article is here.
The ACMG recommendations are here.
