After my fun week in Chicago at the Society for Neuroscience conference, I’m now trying to catch up on tweets and blog posts I missed from the American Society of Human Genetics meeting, in Honolulu.

Nature News‘s conference blog has an interesting post reporting one of the first surveys of what kind of people are interested in getting genetic testing — and how their results affect their future health care decisions. The ‘Multiplex Initiative‘ is asking 1,000 healthy adults from a the Henry Ford Health System, in Detroit, whether they’d like to be screened for variants in 15 genes that relate to common diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and lung cancer.

From the Nature post, here’s what the researchers are finding so far about which people choose to get the tests (emphasis mine):

…one of the strongest factors that predicts which patients choose to take the multiplex test was how much the patient believed that behavior contributes to overall risk of disease. Those who believed more strongly that behavior contributes to disease – that smoking, not just genetic makeup, affects the risk of lung cancer, for example – were more likely to get tested. McBride’s interpreted this finding to mean that the patients wouldn’t believe that they were powerless to do anything about their disease risk if they got a “high risk” test result. And, conversely, they might be more motivated to change their behavior by a multiplex test result.

And Robert Reid of Group Health Cooperative in Seattle said that patients who took the multiplex test made slightly more visits to their primary care doctors in the 18 months after getting their test results than they had in the 18 months prior to taking the test. But even though the increase was significant, it was still a small increase in sheer number of visits. What’s more, the number of screening tests ordered on the patients didn’t increase after the genetic tests were completed.

That seemed like good news to me. It could mean that these people are actually discussing with their docs what the results could mean, and how their lifestyle could affect their risk…right? Right?!

Wrong. The survey found that only 11 percent of the people who got tested discussed the findings with their docs (and 14 percent planned to discuss them). Reid counted that as good news, indicating that the patients weren’t overreacting and spurring unnecessary (and costly) diagnostic tests. I think that’s overly optimistic.

What’s happening, it seems, is that genetic testing makes people think more about their health (and thus, going to the doctor more). But what good are these extra visits if the docs aren’t being asked to help interpret the results? Do the patients figure that their doctor wouldn’t know much about genetics, anyway? Are they right?