Empirical Analysis of Current Approaches to Incidental Findings

Abstract

Researchers in the health sciences regularly discover information of potential health importance unrelated to their object of study in the course of their research. However, there appears to be little guidance available on what researchers should do with this information, known in the scientific literature as incidental findings (IFs). The study described here was designed to determine the extent of guidance available to researchers from public sources. This empirical study was part of a larger two-year project funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) to generate guidance on how incidental findings should be managed in human subjects research, especially genetics, genomics, and imaging research. We generated empirical analysis of publicly available guidance and consent forms to help guide a multidisciplinary Working Group of experts in their formulation of normative recommendations reported in this symposium.