Author Archives: Robert Resta
My Mind’s Made Up
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Priorities For The Genetic Counseling Profession For The Next Decade
Lately I have been thinking about the future of genetic counseling and where the profession should be heading. What with busy work schedules, institutional budget crises driven by a shaky economy , and the emotional burdens of caring for our patients, it is easy to lose track of the bigger picture of what the genetic counseling profession should be striving for. So, over a beer (perhaps two), I decided to step back from the craziness of the workaday world and put together some thoughts about where I think our profession should be headed in the coming years. The order of this Top Ten List does not reflect priority. In earlier drafts, I re-ordered the items so often as to destroy any test/re-test reliability. They are all critical, I guess.
Read the list. Argue some points with me. Think it over. Venture your own ideas in the Comments section. Have fun with it.
A “Top Ten” Agenda For The Genetic Counseling Profession For The Next Decennium
1) Work on our relationship with, and develop a better understanding of how we are perceived by, people with disabilities, and their advocates.
2) Integrate our services into the evolving landscape of widely available genetic testing for many common and rare genetic conditions.
3) Develop, conduct, and publish a coherent research agenda about the process and outcomes of genetic counseling so we can effectively deliver genetic counseling in meaningful ways to improve the medical, psychological, and social well-being of our patients.
4) Ensure that genetic counselors are covered providers in all pubic and private insurance plans so that every patient, regardless of socio-economic status, has access to our services.
5) Educate ourselves to stay up to date in the rapidly growing field of genetic medicine, and encourage personal and professional growth.
6) Develop and grow our counseling skills to ensure that all patients receive psychologically, emotionally, and culturally sensitive genetic counseling.
7) Increase the demographic diversity of the profession to reflect our patient population.
8) Increase the professional diversity of genetic counseling jobs and skills so that we are an integral part of all relevant aspects of clinical care, as well as policy development and implementation, laboratory medicine, academics, government services, and research.
9) Encourage active involvement in our professional organizations (NSGC, ABGC), and with our relationships with other professional organizations, to ensure that we have a public face that reflects our priorities and that advocates for the profession.
10) Maintain the highest quality in our training programs to ensure that the profession continues to be supplied with bright, thoughtful, ethical, empathic, and well-educated individuals.
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“Family History In Times of Siege (1945)” by Robert Resta
A full schedule, impatient with patients,
committing the mistake
of heading straight to
matters of fact
But they must tell their stories first
Facts only matter
in the setting of the heart.
§
An incendiary March night,
standing in a meadow,
looking up in little girl wonder
In the distance
Tokyo vaporizing
into hot white ash, carried by a vortex
of burning wind, transformed into
a snowfall from Hell
that calmly floated down, and covered the grass
as far as her eyes could see.
§
August, family and neighbors
crowding the barn
surrounding the only radio in the village
a silent circle of heads
weighted with shame and shock
listening to the Great Emperor
surrender their country to strangers
from across the ocean
But she was secretly relieved
Never again would her asthmatic airway
be inflamed by sirens and the musty air
of a stifling underground shelter
her mother pulling her by a stiffened arm,
protesting, in the purple dark of night
as the world exploded around her.
§
Across the Axis, a tiny girl
cried in a Dresden bunker,
unaware that her desperate mother
had raced back
to coax a stubborn father to join them
in the safety of the depths
Her family history erased forever
by a carpet of bombs
that rolled down the street
to arrive at the door of her house
precisely as her mother opened it
to plead with him to run for his life.
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p + q = Solved, Being the True Story of How the Chromosome Got Its Name
A few weeks ago I discussed different stories we have come to tell about the origins of the convention of using “p” and “q” to identify the chromosomal short and long arms, respectively (L’histoire de p et q: Urban Legends of Cytogenetics). That posting created quite a bit of discussion, particularly on the Cytogenetics Listserv. Several cytogenetics colleagues forwarded a comment from their listserv that should stand as the definitive story of how p & q became established as official cytogenetic nomenclature.
The True Version was related by someone who was in the room when the decision was made. In my previous post I alluded to the Battle of Hastings. That imagery was apparently not far off from the truth; one conference attendee reported that at times the session seemed like World War 2 1/2. As I had suspected, the 1966 Chicago Conference* was the scene of the crime. The suspects included some important figures in the history of medical genetics: Klaus Patau, Jérôme Lejeune, and Lionel Penrose.
Klaus Patau first described the clinical and cytogenetic basis of trisomy 13 in 1960, along with his wife Eeva Therman (the Finnish cytogeneticist who was sometimes called Mrs. X Chromosome), the great dysmorphologist Dave Smith, and two other authors. Patau originally worked at Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and then went on to a long and illustrious career at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
France’s Jérôme Jean Louis Marie Lejeune is known for his lifelong devotion to the study and care of people with Down syndrome. He was a devout Catholic and a friend and advisor to Pope John Paul II. In 1959, Lejeune, along with Raymond Turpin and Marthe Gautier, were the first to report the underlying cytogenetics of Down syndrome. Gautier, a physician who worked in Turpin’s laboratory at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, first thought of the idea to karyotype a patient with Down syndrome patient and noted the presence of an extra chromosome in the cells cultured from a skin biopsy. Lejeune identified the culprit as the twenty-first chromosome. Decades before, several scientists had suggested that Down syndrome might have a cytogenetic basis, including Petrus Waardenburg, Guido Fanconi, and Lionel Penrose, but the technology was not available at the time to test the theory.
Lionel Penrose, the longtime Galton Chair at the Galton Laboratory at University College London, was one of those great polymaths that England seems to be a breeding ground for. He was a psychiatrist, chess master, mathematician, medical geneticist, and, among other things, proposed a method (now called Penrose’s Law) for fairly allocating votes among countries in international organizations like the UN. He statistically established the association between advancing maternal age and an increased risk of Down syndrome.
Back in Chicago, the nomenclature session lasted many hours. Initially, “s” and “l” were recommended for the chromosomal short and long arms. Patau countered with “k” for kurz (German for “short”). Lejeune strongly argued for “p” for petite. This was followed by arguments about naming the long arm, with the concern that “l” could easily be confused for the number 1. In the wee hours of the morning, Penrose entered the room, wanting to know why the session had not yet ended. After hearing about the difficulties, he offered p & q because they were linguistically neutral, and because p + q = 1, evoking the idea that a short arm and a long arm together make one whole unit.
So it turns out that the True Story is closest to Version 4, what I labeled The Hardy-Weinberg version in my earlier post, but it also contains elements of Version 1 (The French Connection) and Version 2 (Francophones vs. Anglophones). Alas and alack, Version 3 (The NY Typesetter’s Error) appears to have no basis in truth, though it is still a good story. Interestingly, the results of the Voting Poll in my previous posting indicated that most people thought The French Connection was the correct story (garnering about 62% of the 211 votes cast by April 30th), whereas the Hardy-Weinberg story came in a distant third at about 11%, with The Francophones vs. The Anglophones attracting 19%, and the New York Typesetter’s Error coming in last with about 8% of the vote.
I guess that when it comes to history, there’s no such thing as The Truth, only distorted versions of it that over time become mistaken for the real thing. Of course, what is really interesting about history is not The Truth so much as the fact that we need to tell stories about our past, and those stories reflect complex personal, psychological, educational, and sociological factors.
* – Chicago Conference (1966): Standardization in Human Cytogenetics: Birth Defects. Original Article Series, Vol 2, No 2, New York, The National Foundation (1966).
Thank you to my colleagues from the Cytogenetics Listserv for forwarding the communication, and to the many readers of the DNA Exchange who took the time vote on The True Story and share their own stories.
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L’histoire de p et q: Urban Myths of Cytogenetics
Karyotypes are sooooo 20th century. Time was when a ripe crop of G-banded chromosomes promised a fruitful harvest of genetic secrets. But nowadays a Giemsa-stained karyotype seems like a quaint low resolution black and white TV set – those cute little D & G groups even have rabbit-ear antennas – compared with the bright, sexy colors of FISH, the fine oligonucleotide detail of microarrays, and the dense volumes of data of generated by high throughput DNA sequencing.
But before all that trypsin, calf serum, and Giemsa stain sails off in a T-25 culture flask to navigate the seas of our mythic memories, some cytogenetic stories need to be told. The tale I want to relate started with an email from Debbie Collins, one of our Kansas City genetic counseling colleagues.
“I went to a lecture today,” Debbie’s email began, “and learned how the chromosome’s short and long arms came to be called p & q.” She then related a story that was completely different than what I had always held to be true.
Debbie’s email got me into a Rudyard Kipling frame of mind. Just how did the chromosome get its name? As it turns out, probably neither Debbie’s story nor my story is true. I searched for the “real” answer in standard genetics textbooks and PubMed, but to no avail. So I unscientifically queried geneticists and cytogeneticists of various stripes and ages about how they thought “p” & “q” came to be the official chromosomal designations. Here are their stories, with annotations by me:
1) The French Connection. This was the most popular version in my unofficial survey. In this story, “p” stands for petite, the French word for “short.” The long arm came to be called “q” because “q” follows “p” in the alphabet. But that seems inconsistent. Why would one chromosomal arm be named after a word and the other arm named after a letter? It would be more logical to call the long arm “g” for grande, French for “big” or “large.”
2) Francophones vs. Anglophones. In this version, the French in fact wanted to go avec “p” et “g”. Mais l’English speaking contingent objected to the French conquering the entire chromosome, apparently still harboring some nationalistic resentment nine centuries after The Norman Conquest. The Anglophones held out for “q” because, they claimed, “q” follows “p” (see The French Connection above). But really “q” appears English and also had the quality of making “p” evoke English rather than French. Even though it gave the appearance of a civilized linguistic compromise in which both sides got to name half of a chromosome, victoire pour les Anglais. Hastings avenged!
3) The New York Typesetter’s Error. This is the version Debbie Collins related to me. The 1971 Paris conferees recommended “p” and “g” á la petite et grande. The nomenclature was reported in 1972 in Birth Defects: Original Article Series, which was published in New York City. A mythical typesetter inadvertently confused “g” for “q”. The mistake was noticed after the issue had gone to press, too late for correction.
Great story, which caters to our stereotypes of New Yorkers’ penchant for giving language a unique twist. Sadly, though, it is not likely true. First off, I’ve never met a cytogeneticist who was not pathologically detail-oriented, and there is no way they would ever let an error like that get beyond the earliest stages. But more tellingly, although the Paris Conference indeed recommended “p” and “q”, these designations were in use at least 5 years before the 1971 meeting.
4) The Hardy-Weinberg Equilbrium. As one source quoted to me, all geneticists know that p + q = 1. This has nice poetic and historical resonance . But it sounds too pat to be true. Somehow, I can’t imagine a sober-minded committee thinking this up, and then everyone agreeing to it (or perhaps they weren’t sober). Besides, what does cytogenetics have to do with the Hardy-Weinberg Law?
After spending an inordinate amount of time on PubMed, I think that I have narrowed down the start of the p/q story to the Chicago Conference in 1966, also published in Birth Defects: Original Article Series (I have to admit, though, that I have been unable to obtain a copy of this publication. If anybody is willing to send me an electronic or print copy, I would be forever indebted). The 1960 Denver Conference, by the way, makes no reference to “p” & “q.”
Which story do you think is true? History is essentially the stories about our past that we have come to believe to be true. So let us choose our history systematically and democratically, rather than leaving it to the confabulations of story tellers or the biased views of the powerful. We can create the truth by popular vote, rather than simply relying on bothersome facts. Use the polling box below to vote for your favorite story so we can settle on the official History of Chromosome Nomenclature. Please, no stuffing the ballot box to ensure that your favorite theory wins; I have ways of finding this out and I will hunt you down. It would also be fun to hear other theories that I may have overlooked, so please use the Comments section to add to the list of Urban Legends of Cytogenetics.
See the follow-up to this posting on the DNA Exchange: “p+q = Solved, Being The True Story of How the Chromosome Got Its Name.”
Thanks to Debbie Collins, Alex Minna Stern, and Nathaniel Comfort for helpful discussions.
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A Lover’s Lament: What If We Stopped Seeing Each Other?
Your head says forget it
But your heart’s still smokin’
-Joni Mitchell, “You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio”
I love my profession. My heart belongs to my wife, but that’s a different sort of love.* I love my job because it affords me the privilege of being admitted into the deep recesses of patients’ emotional landscapes as they make complicated decisions and experience life-altering events. And I love genetic counseling because it let’s me believe that my skills and education are making a dent in this hard, hard world. I hope that I am helping reduce the emotional and physical suffering from genetic disease and that I make patients’ lives better in small or big ways.
Or perhaps I am unrealistically romantic. It could be that for many patients genetic counseling doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Maybe I get more out of this relationship than they do.
Intimate relationships are, by their nature, plagued by doubt. But unexplored doubt only festers. So let me ask a very difficult question: Would it make a heck of a lot of difference to the world if the profession of genetic counseling abruptly vanished? Who would notice?
We like to think that we are critical to Mission Healthcare. And no doubt we can all supply a fistful of anecdotes to support our case. This patient was given inaccurate information by her physician and almost had an unnecessary mastectomy before she saw me. Or how about that physician who told the patient she had Huntington disease when in fact she had a normal number of repeats? That poor woman was beside herself. A patient last week said I was the only one who could help her come to grips with her child’s diagnosis, and she finally felt like she and her husband could get on with the business of being a family again. And then there was that evil dragon of an insurance company I slew the other day.
To be sure, these anecdotes are important to me; they keep my heart smokin’. But my head asks “How do we know that somebody else couldn’t do our job as well, if not better, or that our jobs are even necessary?” Where are the studies that compare genetic counselors to other healthcare providers, or to smart phone apps for that matter? There are a few studies, but they are limited by small sample sizes or questionable outcome measures like information recall and anxiety. Which genetic counseling patient isn’t rightly anxious and wouldn’t it be more useful to help them cope with their anxiety rather than trying to make it poof-disappear?
So if genetic counselors weren’t here, maybe some people would never quite grasp the subtleties of x-linked inheritance, the mechanics of adjacent 1 segregation, or the bayesian likelihood that they will have a child with spinal muscular atrophy. Who knows if patients even care about these matters? We all know that knowledge has very little to do with decision-making or adaptation and patients will still be just as anxious. And if prenatal diagnosis ceased to exist, the net result would be an increase in the number of births of children with Down syndrome . One might argue this is not exactly a public health emergency or a critical failure of the healthcare system.
How can I doubt something I have been doing for three decades? Well, the doubt is mostly in my head, not in my heart. So I challenge you all to restore my faith in this relationship. Prove our value to patients and the healthcare system. Go out and do the studies. Measure all kinds of outcomes – psychosocial adaptation, public health measures like reducing the incidence of serious cancers, quality of decision making (how come nobody tries to measure whether patients make good decisions or bad decisions?), empowerment, perceive personal control, whatever. Do them all. Let’s finally listen seriously to Shoshana Shiloh, Marion McAllister, Barb Biesecker and the other researchers who have been prodding us for years to examine genetic counseling outcomes. But then be prepared to take a long, hard look at ourselves, what we do, if we should even be doing it, question our assumptions and ethos, and think about how we should change the very nature of genetic counseling. Let’s be sure the relationship is as rewarding for our patients as it is for us. Make the fire in my heart spark some passion in my head.
* – My love for my wife is better evoked by this verse from a Tom Waits song:
In this land there’s a town/In that town there’s a house/ In that house there’s a woman/And in that woman there’s a heart that I love.
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Kellogg’s Complaint
Improper kinds of food in the stomach and intestines, will, in this excessively irritable state of the system, cause nocturnal emissions……Farinaecous foods, properly prepared, is incomparably the best aliment for such a sufferer.….
– from A Lecture to Young Men (1838) by Sylvester Graham, Inventor of Graham Crackers
I study the history of genetics because it provides insight into the practice and ethos of genetic counseling. The historical perspective helps me understand why I do what I do. But I also love studying history because of its quirky recesses and unsuspected intersections of historical trajectories. Like the common thread of eugenics that runs through the histories of masturbation, breakfast cereal, and vasectomy.
Most scholars point to the early 18th century as the beginning of the Western World’s repulsion/fascination with masturbation. In about 1712, an anonymous author published a pamphlet titled Onania; or The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution and all its Frightful Consequences, in both SEXES Considered …. (the title goes on for another 30 words or so) that describes the physical and psychological toll taken on those who engaged in what was politely called “the solitary vice,” as well as advice on how to treat the newly-minted medical condition. Onania appeared in multiple editions throughout Europe and the United States. Over the next two centuries numerous similar publications followed , all variations on the same theme, i.e. men and women needed to be saved from the debilitating effects of this evil practice (WARNING: This video link is somewhat risqué).
Some of the great minds of Western history weighed in on self-stimulation, such as Immanuel Kant (he is the father of autonomy, after all), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and of course Sigmund Freud. Richard Wagner, the great German composer and anti-Semite, foreshadowed future connections between eugenics and masturbation when he blamed the degeneracy of Jews on their supposed frequent practice of “self-pollution.” Some authors recommended extreme physical measures to prevent masturbation (WARNING: this link is not for the weak of heart or those who might be offended by unusual paraphernalia). Christine O’Donnell is just one of the lesser lights in a long and eclectic line of anti-masturbationists.
In America, one of the most committed anti-masturbationists was John Harvey Kellogg, a respected surgeon who believed that a vegetarian diet and vigorous exercise promoted physical and emotional health. Kellogg was particularly concerned that sex, including sexual relations between husband and wife , was detrimental to health and well-being (all of his 42 children were adopted or foster. He and his wife slept in separate bedrooms and proudly spoke of their lack of a sexual relationship). The most debilitating sexual behavior was masturbation, which, according to Kellogg, could be identified by any of 39 signs such as general debility, early signs of consumption, premature and defective development, failure of mental capacity, love of solitude, unnatural boldness, mock piety, paralysis, and eating clay, slate pencils, plaster, and chalk.
For Kellogg, the solution to the masturbation problem was simple – a healthy diet and active lifestyle. Kellogg concocted various foods with the aim of promoting health and preventing masturbation. Granola was one of his earlier attempts. Eventually, Kellogg, along with his brother Will, developed what they felt was the perfect health food – flaked dry cereal, what we know today as Kellogg’s Cornflakes. The Kellogg brothers served cornflakes at their exclusive Sanitarium in Battle Creek to well-heeled clients – along with a daily serving of yogurt administered to both ends of their clients’ digestive tracts. One bowl of cornflakes in the morning and Voila! not only will you be healthy, you will become master of your own domain.
Concerned as he was with individual purity, it is not surprising that Kellogg was interested in racial purity. In 1906 (the same year his brother Will founded what would eventually become the Kellogg Cereal company), he established the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek. The Foundation, one of the key eugenic centers in the United States, sponsored 3 conferences on race betterment, collected eugenic family histories, and worked with other eugenics organizations around the country.
From here the story heads south to the state reformatory for youthful offenders in Jeffersonville, Indiana where Dr. Harry Sharp presided as the institution’s medical superintendent. The aptly named Dr. Sharp is generally regarded as the father of vasectomy. Sharp honed his surgical skills on the reformatory’s young men among whom masturbation was presumably a common occurrence, a behavior that did not sit well with the medical superintendent. As Sharp tells it “…the story of my first operation in October, 1899. A boy 19 years old came to me and asked he be castrated, as he could not resist the desire to masturbate….I did the operation [vasectomy, not castration]…..In two month’s time he came to me and told me he had ceased to masturbate and that he was all right… Three months after that operation he made satisfactory advances in the school. This was true practically of every man operated on; every man who has ceased to masturbate has assigned the same reason: practically every man sleeps better, feels better and has a better appetite.” Sharp went on to perform another 175 vasectomies between 1899 and 1907 “solely for the purpose of relief from the habit of masturbation.”
Sharp, like many of his contemporaries, became interested in eugenics. From his viewpoint in a penal institution, he saw a world overcrowded with indiscriminately breeding mental and physical defectives: “The class of individuals is very prolific, from the fact that in the matter of sexuality, as in everything else, they know of no self-restraint. They indulge their selfish lust, ab libitum, with no thought whatsoever as to what the result may be…..They simply know that they want gratification, and gratification they are going to have.” Sharp wanted to curtail reproduction among those with defective germ plasm. After dismissing alternative approaches like marriage restriction laws, castration, and segregation, he championed vasectomy as the cure for eugenic degradation because, in his view, the procedure was quick and easy to perform, had no serious side effects, did not hamper a man’s pursuit of life, liberty or happiness, and “it is endorsed by the persons subjected to it.” Sharp performed 456 eugenic vasectomies between 1899 and 1908. Note that Indiana did not enact a mandatory sterilization law until 1907; in 1909, Indiana governor Thomas Marhsall ordered a moratorium on sterilizations (In an odd historical connection to another well-known consumer products company, the reformatory eventually became a factory for Colgate-Palmolive).
It is easy to dismiss Kellogg as a, well, flake, and Sharp as a narrow-minded crank. Yet in many ways society has benefited from both men (though not in the ways they intended). Neither man fits neatly into labels like eugenicist or eccentric. They were complex men who were products of their complicated times. Eugenics, anti-masturbation preaching, health foods, and vasectomy were all “in the air” in the late 19th century, and it is not surprising that their paths should criss-cross.
There is an ironic modern twist to the end of this tale. The state of Washington recently enacted legislation granting licensure to genetic counselors. In completing my license application, I was required to affirm that I have never been convicted of “frotteurism.” I have never been accused or convicted of any crime but I could not honestly answer the question because I didn’t know the meaning of frotteurism, so I looked it up: the practice of touching or rubbing against the clothed body of another person in a crowd as a means of obtaining sexual gratification. All those bowls of cornflakes and graham crackers from my childhood finally paid off.
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Considering The Future of Genetic Counseling, Act II
| When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened. | |
| John M. Richardson, Jr. |
Those who predict the future are doomed to be wrong; just ask anyone at the race track or on Wall Street. But fear of failure should not hold us back; we have much to learn from error. So, to continue with the theme of the future of genetic counseling (see my previous posting), I will venture a few more guesses about the issues we should be considering when planning for tomorrow.
1. ) Safe and Legal Abortion Is Not Guaranteed For The Future : Abortion and abortion providers are under legal, social, and physical attack. It is not out of the question that Roe v. Wade may one day be overturned. Although it makes us uncomfortable to hear it, prenatal diagnosis is largely predicated on the availability of abortion. It does not make economic sense to offer aneuploidy screening primarily to prepare parents for the birth of a
child with disabilities. If abortion becomes unavailable, insurers may be less likely to cover prenatal diagnosis, which could result in a dramatic drop in prenatal diagnosis job opportunities. And economic issues aside, is it morally justifiable to undertake the small risk of losing the pregnancy from amniocentesis or CVS simply because of parental anxiety or the desire for emotional preparation? You say that prenatal diagnosis can be important to long term developmental/medical outcome and familial adaptation. I say, aside from rare exceptions, the data is just not there to support your contention (and remember that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”). So go out and do the studies and prove me wrong.
2) We Can’t Afford to Ignore Cost Effectiveness: Genetic counseling will likely come under increasing economic scrutiny. While I want to believe that our value to health care goes beyond dollar-savings, we nonetheless have to fiscally justify our employment and work loads. And, at times, we may be facing
contradictory economic pressures. We will want to show that we lower healthcare costs by reducing the number of unnecessary genetic tests, ensuring appropriate medical screening based on genetic assessment, or whatever other means to demonstrate that we help produce a healthier population in a cost-effective manner.
On the other hand, we will be receiving subtle and not so subtle pressures from our employers to increase the number of revenue-raising activities. Back in the early 2000s, many centers, including my own, experienced a sharp drop in the number of patients who underwent amniocentesis, I suspect the result of a social trend in changes in attitudes toward abortion and disability. At one point, my boss said only half-kiddingly “Bob, you are counseling yourself right out of a job.” Genetic counselors need to take the lead in conducting studies that show our cost-effectiveness while simultaneously demonstrating that we do not hurt our institutions’ bottom lines.
3) The Human Genome Project May Not Deliver On Its Promises: Genomic medicine is the medical technology du jour. All sorts of claims have been made about how genetics will revolutionize health care and cure everything from diabetes to the heartbreak of psoriasis. We have promised the moon. But what if the “genetic revolution” never comes? Or what if genomic medicine
simply falls by the wayside as some new medical technology becomes sexier and more promising than genetics? Will funding for genetic research and clinical positions dry up? We need to stay alert to changes in other areas of medical care and adapt genetics to the changing practice of medicine.
4) The United States Will Not Be The Center Of The Genetics Universe: Until relatively recently, genetic counseling and genetic counselors have been concentrated in the US. Although I haven’t tabulated the numbers, I am pretty sure there are more genetic counselors in the US than in the rest of the world combined. While many valuable contributions have come from Canada,
the UK, both sides of the Tasman Sea, the Netherlands and other countries, the US has been the leader in the field (I will accept any criticisms of national chauvinism leveled by my international colleagues). But over the last 10-15 years, genetic counseling has spread to many other countries. New genetic counseling models will emerge as genetic counselors work in different cultural and geographic settings, especially in non-English speaking countries. More international meetings, communication, and cooperative transnational research will be critical to the future of genetic counseling. The US model is one way of providing genetic counseling; it is not THE way, or necessarily the best way.
5) Office Visits and Flipbooks Are Soooo 20th Century: As Allie Janson Hazell and others keep reminding me, the Internet and e-technologies offer opportunities to reach more patients in a variety of ways. And as Vicki Venne recently pointed out, Millenial Generation students and patients are not going to stand for old fogey communication and teaching techniques. Some of us are just beginning to utilize the telephone to communicate test results.
I mean, come on, Sugar, it’s time to take a walk on the Wild Side.
We must open our minds and embrace, adapt to, and integrate new communication technologies to better serve our patients. Brick-and-mortar counseling has a critical place, but it may not always be the best way to ply our trade. And on-line genetic testing is not necessarily the spawn of Satan. We can’t – and maybe shouldn’t – control access to all genetic testing, but we can work to make sure genetic testing is used effectively and appropriately by patients and health care providers.
I hope I have provoked some of you into disagreement, thought, and action. Where am I off the mark? Which of my predictions are bound to be wrong? What are your predictions? How can we best prepare ourselves for the future?
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Demographics and The Future of Genetic Counseling
Those who do not study and prepare for the future are doomed to live it rather than to shape it. Keeping an eye on what might be coming down the road in the next 30 years could help genetic counselors play a key role in 21st century medical care. Let’s look at the some of
the demographic factors that got us here and then try to figure out where things might be headed.
Since about 1980, genetic counselors have been surfing a significant and unrelenting demographic wave – delayed childbearing. The AMA rate (the percentage of pregnancies to women 35 and above) increased virtually every year from 5% in 1980 to nearly 15% in 2008; this pattern is even more pronounced in many Western European nations. We were in the right place at the right time. With apologies to the Beach Boys, we caught a wave and we were sittin’ on top of the world. Incidentally, I have noticed an ever so slight flattening of the AMA rate in the US over the last few years; I am not saying that it’s a close out yet or that we should grab the next ankle buster that rolls in, but we should be keeping our eyes open for a different demographic heavy.
The growing AMA rate profoundly influenced the genetic counseling job market and the very practice of genetic counseling. For example, the number of genetic counseling jobs increased with:
- The number of women seeking prenatal diagnosis due primarily to their age.
- The false positive rate of serum and ultrasound screening for fetal aneuploidy, with much higher false positive rates for women over 35, resulting in more referrals for genetic counseling.
- The number of referrals for infertility, which increases with the age of the parents.
- More referrals for genetic counseling for breast cancer. Although delayed child-bearing itself is not a hallmark of hereditary breast cancer, it can result in younger age at diagnosis and hence more likely to lead to genetic counseling.
The AMA rate also helped to shape the ethos and face of genetic counseling. The Holy Ethical Trinity of genetic counseling – autonomy, informed consent, and reproductive freedom – is worshiped by the largely liberal and progressive AMA population. Not surprisingly, the demographic profile of genetic counselors broadly reflects the patient population they serve, i.e., middle to upper middle class well-educated white women. We have more or less been the socioeconomic, physical, and ethical mirror images of our patients.
Trends, of course, have a habit of being temporary. The AMA rate will likely eventually decline as socio-economic factors change, reproductive preferences fluctuate , and political moods swing. So what other demographic trends might influence the future of genetic counseling? Here are some population projections for the year 2050, based on a report from the Pew Research Center:
- About 20% of Americans will be foreign-born, which will be greater than the percentage of foreign-born Americans during the great migrations from Europe a century ago. Currently, about 12% of the US population is foreign-born.
- Non-Hispanic whites will make up less than 50% of the US population
- The percentage of the US population who are Latino or Asian will increase to 29% and 13%, up from 14% and 5%, respectively (to say nothing of the increase in people of mixed ethnicity).
- The percentage of the US population 65 and older will increase from 12% to 19%
What might this mean for the practice and profession of genetic counseling profession? For simplicity’s sake, I am ignoring other factors that can influence the future of the profession, such as advances in medical technology, new health care delivery models, and changes in the economics of medical services.
First off, we must increase the ethnic diversity of the genetic counseling profession so that we – and our support staff – reflect the demographic make-up of our patients. This can help overcome significant social and psychological barriers to medical services and improve the cultural awareness and sensitivity of the profession. Perhaps we can take a lesson from Canada, where immigrants already comprise 20% of the population. Secondly, the guiding ethical and counseling principles of the profession must evolve to be in tune with the many and varied beliefs of an ethically and ethnically diverse population. Not every culture buys into the supremacy of individual autonomy, nondirectiveness, or other lofty ethical principles of Western medicine.
An aging population means that we will be seeing more patients who are physically and cognitively impaired. The traditional educational and counseling models utilized by genetic counselors may not be particularly effective for this segment of the population. Because it may not be so easy for older individuals to navigate to and around large urban medical centers we may need to increase our presence in alternative medical care settings. From a clinical standpoint, we will also need to be sensitive to new or unanticipated manifestations of genetic diseases.
Where do you see the genetic counseling profession in the next 10, 20, or 30 years? What demographic trends do you think are important? How can we best prepare ourselves? What did I miss? Where do you disagree with me?
Filed under Robert Resta
A Question of Race
Biological ancestry is an important part of genetic counseling. Sometimes we call it race or ethnicity, or ask “What countries are your ancestors from?” I am not quite sure what the difference is between race and ethnicity, though in the workaday world of genetic counseling, I over-simplify it for myself by thinking of race, or more precisely, biological ancestry as relevant to genetic disease issues whereas ethnicity reflects sociocultural issues that are relevant to the counseling end of things.
There is much debate about the ethics, meaning, and utility of the terms “race” and “ethnicity.” The arguments for and against these concepts are intricate and complicated; just thinking about them gives me a headache. While the debate is important to genetic counseling, I want to put those arguments aside for a moment. Instead I want to look at the ways that patients respond to the question about their ancestry, and what those responses tell us about social issues, family relationships, stereotyping, and prejudice.
We have all heard many responses when we pose the question of biological ancestry to patients. The puzzled look, followed by “White.” The consumer-society influenced “Heinz 57.” The patriotic “American.” The historical “My family has been here since the Mayflower” (given the number of times I’ve heard that one, the Mayflower must have held more passengers than Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas). Of course, many patients are proud of their ancestry.
Responses sometimes reflect social issues. In 1983 when I first started as a genetic counselor, my patients rarely answered that they were Native American. Over time, a certain amount of cachet has become attached to being at least partially Native American, that it somehow makes you exotic or cool if you have some “Indian blood.” Now a surprising number of my patients claim to have Native American ancestry. Yet when carefully questioned as to who in their lineage was Native American, the answer is often along the lines of “Well, my great-great-grandfather lived next door to someone who knew a Cherokee.” In many cases, if they had a nosebleed, they would lose their “Indian blood.” It is an interesting example of how, over time, intense hatred can evolve into a distorted sense of pride toward a population group, an attitude shift which no doubt many Native Americans find questionable.
A patient’s answer may provide some insight into family dynamics. For example, the patient may say they are Swedish. When asked if they are full Swedish, the response can be “Well, we’re also German and Polish on my mother’s side, but my father was full Swedish and we were closer to his family, so we always say we are Swedish.”
Sometimes, prejudice and stereotype rear their ugly heads. I have particularly noticed this when I ask if the patient is Ashkenazi Jewish. More than once, I have gotten a harsh response along the lines of “I ain’t no Jew” accompanied by a derisive facial expression. More subtle stereotyping is evident when patients remark “Well I don’t think I am Jewish but I have a big nose” or “Maybe. I am very good with money.” Then they look nervously at me. Many patients think that I am Jewish, as do many of my colleagues. As much as we don’t like to admit it, we all engage in some level of stereotyping and apparently I fit a common Jewish stereotype – educated, from the East Coast, healthcare professional, a physical appearance that roughly conforms to an idea of “Jewish.” In fact, I am a (ex)Catholic whose grandparents were born in Italy and Poland. Either verbally or with expressions, patients indicate that they are unsure if I am Jewish and worry that their remark offended me. In some weird way I feel like a “victim” of prejudice toward a group that I am not even a member of. The remarks are slightly offensive, but not in the same way they would be to a counselor who is Jewish. Rarely do I hear a patient claim to be Jewish when they are not. Apparently, Native American is much higher on the Racial Coolness Hierarchy Scale than Jewish.
These peculiarities about biological ancestry also play out in the world of genetic ancestry testing. Just what value is that information for one’s sense of self? Is it merely an innocent curiosity, or is there a darker underlying truth about how people conceptualize race or ethnicity? Do people think DNA variants and country of origin are somehow biologically tied to behavior and temperament? If you discover that one of your haplogroups is common in Ireland, will you start drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, have large dysfunctional families, develop a new interest in Lords of the Dance, and write great literature (or whatever your stereotype of how an Irishman behaves) simply because of some DNA polymorphisms? Remember, too, that ultimately we are all out of Africa, wherever our ancestors paused or whoever they bred with along the way.
I would like to hear your experiences and thoughts about asking patients about their ancestry. Please leave comments; they are what make blogs interesting.
Filed under Robert Resta
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