Medics should plan ahead for incidental findings

Doctors, researchers and companies should expect to find information they were not looking for in genetic analyses, imaging scans and other tests, concludes a report from the US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Moreover, medics and investigators should discuss with patients and research volunteers how these potentially serious findings will be handled before the tests are carried out.

The advice given by the report echoes previous recommendations in specific fields. Still, researchers say it is a useful summary of basic overarching principles for grappling with 'incidental findings' that occur when a test ordered for one purpose uncovers information about another, unrelated health risk.

“They get to the heart of what needs to be done, and there is a need to codify this,” says James Evans, a geneticist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, of the panel's recommendations.

Although incidental findings have always occurred in medicine and research, the rise of more omniscient tests that can reveal large amounts of information about a person’s risk factors have posed urgent ethical questions about how to...