Among possible harms from health checks, they listed "overdiagnosis, overtreatment, distress or injury from invasive follow-up tests, distress due to false positive test results, false reassurance due to false negative test results, adverse psychosocial effects due to labeling, and difficulties with getting insurance".
However, some characteristics of applicants vulnerable to high distress have been identified including: high pre-test distress, carrier status, complicated grief, more affected first-degree relatives, and strong emotional illness representations [ 11, 12].
Although the risk for adverse psychological effects cannot be ruled out completely, studies suggest that increased post-test distress among at-risk individuals, who electively pursue predictive testing and who first receive pre-test genetic counseling, is usually transient and not clinically significant [ 59].
Possible harms from health checks are overdiagnosis, overtreatment, distress or injury from invasive follow-up tests, distress due to false positive test results, false reassurance due to false negative test results, possible continuation of adverse health behaviours due to negative test results, adverse psychosocial effects due to labelling, and difficulties with getting insurance.
Final scores range between 0 and 35 for intrusion and 0 and 40 for avoidance (total score between 0 and 75), with values of more than 19 for each subscore (38 for total score) representing high test induced distress and values below 8.5 for each subscore (17 for total score) representing low distress.
However, future studies may want to test how distress measures as proposed here and possibly others might best be integrated into a unifying measure of distress to reliably predict cardiac prognosis after MI.
Most studies showed that immediately after disclosure of the test result, distress significantly increases, but decreases again after 6 months.
However, extensive prior research shows there is no significant long term psychological impact: after an initial increase following BRCA1/2 testing, psychosocial distress returns to pre-testing levels over time [ 33- 39].
(viii) Test-Related Distress and Positive Experiences (women who choose testing only): This measure includes 10 items from a validated questionnaire (the Multidimensional Impact of Risk Assessment Scale) [ 37] assessing distress (six items) and positive experiences (four items) about genetic testing.
Psychologists have a method for testing infant distress at unresponsive faces called the "still face paradigm".
Moreover, test-related distress may have a negative effect on compliance with health-protective behaviours [ 13].
