Freedom of Choice About Incidental Findings Can Frustrate Participants' True Preferences.

Ethicists, regulators and researchers have struggled with the question of whether incidental findings in genomics studies should be disclosed to participants. In the ethical debate, a general consensus is that disclosed information should benefit participants. However, there is no agreement that genetic information will benefit participants, rather it may cause problems such as anxiety. One could get past this disagreement about disclosure of incidental findings by letting participants express their preferences in the consent form. We argue that this freedom of choice is problematic. In transferring the decision to participants, it is assumed that participants will understand what they decide about and that they will express what they truly want. However, psychological findings about people's reaction to probabilities and risk have been shown to involve both cognitive and emotional challenges. People change their attitude to risk depending on what is at stake. Their mood affects judgments and choices, and they over- and underestimate probabilities depending on whether they are low or high. Moreover, different framing of the options can steer people to a specific choice. Although it seems attractive to let participants express their preferences to incidental findings in the consent form, it is uncertain if this choice enables people to express what they truly prefer. In order to better understand the participants' preferences, we argue that future empirical work needs to confront the participant with the complexity of the uncertainty and the trade-offs that are connected with the uncertain predictive value of genetic risk information.

Incidental findings: the time is not yet ripe for a policy for biobanks.

Incidental findings (IFs) are acknowledged to be among the most important ethical issues to consider in biobank research. Genome-wide association studies and disease-specific genetic research might reveal information about individual participants that are not related to the research purpose, but may be relevant to those participants' future health. In this article, we provide a synopsis of arguments for and against the disclosure of IFs in biobank research. We argue that arguments that do not distinguish between communications about pathogenic conditions and complex genetic risk for diseases fail, as preferences and decisions may be far more complex in the latter case. The principle of beneficence, for example, often supports the communication of incidentally discovered diseases, but if communication of risk is different, the beneficence of such communication is not equally evident. By conflating the latter form of communication with the former, the application of ethical principles to IFs in biobank research sometimes becomes too easy and frictionless. Current empirical surveys of people's desire to be informed about IFs do not provide sufficient guidance because they rely on the same notion of risk communication as a form of communication about actual health and disease. Differently designed empirical research and more reflection on biobank research and genetic risk information is required before ethical principles can be applied to support the adoption of a reasonable and comprehensive policy for handling IFs.