Our hypothesis is that the subjects eligible for a genetic test, having a high number of relatives affected by tumours and often stricken themselves, are not only more open to information regarding their risk, but also more aware in comparison to subjects with familiarity or with sporadic events of breast and/or ovarian

tumours in their family [10, 14, 40]. As far as the association between psychological variables and risk perception is concerned, some studies evidenced that there is a positive correlation between the perception Selleckchem GSK2245840 of risk and levels of psychological distress. However, in this study, no such correlation was found, despite the fact that the psychological distress levels reached the cut-off value of disturbance

in adaptation. We do not have an Italian regulatory sample of reference for HADs which considers not only subjects with tumours but also healthy subjects. However, in a population of women with breast cancer the percentage of subjects unable to adapt to the situation was of 24% (19% in selleck our sample) and of 9,8% with at least an episode of major depression (24% in our sample) [32]. These two scores, as set forth in the methods, are obtained adding the score of each individual measure of anxiety and depression. Taking this into consideration, it is interesting to note that in our sample the raising of the percentage of Cetuximab price the subjects with at least one episode of major depression, with respect to regulatory samples (24% vs 9.8%), www.selleckchem.com/products/ml323.html derives from the elevation of the anxiety scale: 25% of borderline anxiety samples and 25% with anxiety disorders. Despite the fact that a high psychological distress is shown, mainly consisting of an element of anxiety, there is no association between the risk perception “”per se”" and

anxiety or depression levels and neither between the accuracy of risk perception and anxiety or depression levels. This could depend on the fact that the HAD’s scale, although largely used in genetic counseling for hereditary tumours, reveal a type of “”general”" psychological distress linked to a pathological event rather than a “”cancer-specific”" distress. Punctual correlations between distress and perception levels found in literature has been evidenced through the use of cancer-specific instruments (for measuring distress levels due to cancer worries) such as the Cancer Worry Scale of Lerman, or the Impact of Event Scale of Horowitz [36, 41]. The latter can be adapted for a kind of distress due to specific pathologies. Unfortunately, these tests are not still validate in all country – specific languages, (i.e.