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INSTEAD of helping people avoid illness, knowing the results of genetic tests
could make things worse.

One of the first benefits of the human genome should be a host of genetic
tests that reveal how likely you are to get, say, cancer or heart disease. But
the popular misconception that our destinies are written in our genes means that
such potentially life-saving tests could backfire, says Theresa Marteau, a
psychologist at Guy鈥檚, King鈥檚 and St Thomas鈥檚 Medical School in London.

Marteau and her colleagues reviewed published evidence on how people respond
to genetic information. They found that for some conditions, such as inherited
breast cancer, patients who had tested positive were no more likely to come
forward for screening than those who merely had a family history of the disease.
For other diseases, positive test results led to a sense of fatalism. People
seemed to believe they were going to get sick no matter what they did. And
smokers who learned that they had a genetic predisposition to cancer were no
more successful at kicking the habit than others.

Simply giving people test results isn鈥檛 enough. Extra advice and support are
needed to help people to alter their habits, says Marteau. 鈥淎lthough people
can鈥檛 change their genes, they can change their risk by changing their
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