Implications for Practice: Key Areas for Clinicians to Explore With Patients That Might Improve Risk Assessment Communication and Disease Management Strategies
| Constructs | Key Areas |
|---|---|
| Salience | Number of affected relatives |
| Affected relative’s age at diagnosis or death | |
| Severity of illness: premature death or disability | |
| Acknowledging familial risk | |
| Influence of gender, class, ethnic group | |
| Living through relative’s illness experience | |
| Shared environment with affected relative | |
| Counting and discounting familial events | |
| Comparing similarities and differences with affected relatives | |
| Patterns within family history, eg, ages, gender, etc | |
| Personalizing process | Models of health and illness |
| Models of disease causation | |
| Models of inheritance | |
| Notions of bad luck and fatalism | |
| Personal sense of vulnerability | Behavior change, eg, lifestyle risk factors |
| Undergoing disease screening | |
| Acceptability of disease as illness or mode of death | |
| Continued anxiety |