Essential Elements of Genetic Cancer Risk Assessment, Counseling, and Testing: Updated Recommendations of the National Society of Genetic Counselors

Updated from their original publication in 2004, these cancer genetic counseling recommendations describe the medical, psychosocial, and ethical ramifications of counseling at-risk individuals through genetic cancer risk assessment with or without genetic testing. They were developed by members of the Practice Issues Subcommittee of the National Society of Genetic Counselors Familial Cancer Risk Counseling Special Interest Group. The information contained in this document is derived from extensive review of the current literature on cancer genetic risk assessment and counseling as well as the personal expertise of genetic counselors specializing in cancer genetics. The recommendations are intended to provide information about the process of genetic counseling and risk assessment for hereditary cancer disorders rather than specific information about individual syndromes. Essential components include the intake, cancer risk assessment, genetic testing for an inherited cancer syndrome, informed consent, disclosure of genetic test results, and psychosocial assessment. These recommendations should not be construed as dictating an exclusive course of management, nor does use of such recommendations guarantee a particular outcome. These recommendations do not displace a health care provider's professional judgment based on the clinical circumstances of a client.     

Risk Perception and Affect

ABSTRACT— Humans perceive and act on risk in two fundamental ways. Risk as feelings refers to individuals' instinctive and intuitive reactions to danger. Risk as analysis brings logic, reason, and scientific deliberation to bear on risk management. Reliance on risk as feelings is described as "the affect heuristic." This article traces the development of this heuristic and discusses some of the important ways that it impacts how people perceive and evaluate risk.     

Autism as impairment in the formation and use of meaning: an attempt to integrate a functional and a neurological model

Neurological approaches and functional approaches to impairments in autism provide different perspectives on the disorder. This study attempted an integration of the two approaches, based specifically on the role of the mesolimbic/neostriatal system in imparting adaptive meaning to percepts and problems that autistic persons have in making adaptive use of meaning.     

Word associations in old age: evidence for consistency in semantic encoding during adulthood

Word associations of 80 young and 80 older adults were compared for 113 stimulus words. The proportion of paradigmatic responses varied with the grammatical class of the stimulus word and with the vocabulary level of the subject, but not with age. The same proportion of young and older adults gave the most common responses. Although older adults had a greater number of unique responses, this seems to reflect age differences in vocabulary level, as vocabulary but not age was a good predictor. Within-subject variability was also comparable across age, as on a retest young and older adults gave the same proportion of responses that were identical to those on the original test. Both age groups were more likely to repeat common than uncommon responses on the retest. This, together with analyses of response latency, suggests equivalent use of strategic processes across age. The results indicate that semantic structure and semantic encoding in adults are related to verbal ability, but not to age.     

Editorial

Science and religion share the conviction that the world is intelligible, susceptible to being logically understood, but they delineate this under different paradigms. In the cleanest cases we can say that science operates with the presumption that there are causes to things, religion with the presumption that there are meanings to things.
—Holmes Rolston III     

Youth, family and employment

Some of the functions and dysfunctions of youth employment in contemporary society are discussed. The focus then shifts to a third variable: family dynamics. The research indicates that youth unemployment prolongs residence with parents. The younger the youth, the more tolerant are the parents of the unemployment. It was also found that a daughter's lack of employment in the summer months is more acceptable than a son's; that debts are part of the lifestyle of youth after age 18; that males incur more debts than do females; and that parents are the major source of financial loans.     

A. V. Lunačarskij und L. D. Trockij. Eine kulturtheoretische Kontroverse und ihre Folgen

Ohne ZusammenfassungPresented at the III World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Washington, DC, November 1985.