Findings on the relation between education and perceived risk concluded that women with high school or less education were more likely to be either unaware of their risk or overestimate their risk, whereas women with college education STI571 datasheet were less likely to have an optimistic bias [14]. The role of religion in health care decisions and perceived risk among people at increased genetic risk has not been deeply investigated yet. It exists a

certain kind of religious fatalism (a belief that some issues are beyond human control but just in God’s hands) that may influence the subjects’ conceptions of how disease occurs and of how much they can be at risk for developing a particular disease based on family history [16, 17]. On the basis of this kind of fatalism we may hypothesize that the perception of the risk is lower for subjects with high spirituality, as demonstrate by JM Quillin research [17]. Furthermore many studies focused on the role played by psychological distress levels and by the personal and family history of tumour in filtering, modifying and completing CH5183284 molecular weight relevant information, concerning the objective risk, affecting in this way the risk perception of developing the disease[11, 12, 14, 18]. As regards the relationship between

the psychological distress and the risk perception findings are opposing. In fact several studies revealed a correlation between high distress levels and high risk perception, while few researches showed no correlation between these two variables [14, 18]. As far as the family history of tumour is concerned, women with a personal and a family history of cancer usually perceived their risk of developing the disease as higher than that of other women. Nevertheless, comparing the risk perception with an objective estimation Morin Hydrate of the risk (Claus,

Gail or BRCA-PRO models), the women affected by cancer and with a family history of tumour are more accurate in their risk estimation than women with a family history of tumour but healthy [11, 12]. Women involved in several studies that revealed an overestimation of the risk perception are usually referred by an affected relative or by health care setting, while the studies that found an underestimation of the risk perception involved women referred by the community. The importance of risk perception in affecting the decisional making process of the counselee and the relationship between the risk perception and other psychological variables are key issues in the research on genetic counselling across different countries. Nevertheless, in Italy, the risk perception has been little studied and counselors still miss relevant information like: how the risk perception is spread on Italian population, how the risk is associated to other psycho-social variables and if the risk perception is accurate or not compared to objective methods of risk estimate[19].