Genetic screening

Impact of modern traditional science has posed a major impact on health care, biology, medicine and social science. Major attention of treating cancer grasped genetics role in causing abnormalities from the time of human genome mapping. High throughput technologies were developed to characterize the cancerous cells. Genetic screening studies helps in better understanding of genes that can cause abnormalities. Interpretation of genetic screening may be either true positive, true negative, false positive, inconclusive and indeterminate results. True negative and false positive results pose major threat to the individuals by insurance discrimination and psychosocial threats in addition. True positive benefits medical interventions.

Underlying principle of genetic screening

Sufferings of cancer can be reduced by proper screening of cancer causing genes. It can also engulf the life of an individual if genetic screening results are wrong. Wrong prediction burdens individual by unnecessary screening of cancer. Genetic screening success depends mainly on the surveillance measures that are available. Genetic screening also raises ethical issues of identifying healthy individuals as ill individuals. Genetic traits face many social, cultural and traditional problems like this. Rules and regulations for genetic screening are being fixed by many statutory bodies. They are as follows.

• Recommendation for genetic counseling
• Indicating parameters set for genetic test
• Genetic information confidentiality
• Responsibility of an individual
• Responsibility of family members and surroundings
• Insurance by health providers
• Importance of education to public and professional
• Need for multidisciplinary approach

Ethical issues of genetic screening

Development of gene targeted drug designing after complete mapping of human genome led to social, cultural, legal and ethical issues. Oncology evoked the ethical and social issues which include individual, family members, relatives, health care providers and public in general. One major issue of genetic screening is perfect prediction of cancer development which is inevitable as it does not benefit individual in revealing all genetic informations.

 Questions:

• Name some inherited cancer syndromes for which genetic testing is available.
• How genetic screening helps in prediction of hereditary cancers?
• What are the rationales for genetic screening?
• What kind of assays assists genetic screening test interpretation?