There is an active debate about the return of incidental findings in genomic research, and recommendations for this setting are evolving. While we acknowledge and hope that investigators find our process and these recommendations useful in their attempts to design thresholds and lists for the return of genomic findings to research participants, we did not design this list for that purpose. The Working Group has designed these recommendations for the situation in which a clinician orders exome or genome sequencing for a specific clinical indication. In this circumstance, a laboratory report will be returned to that clinician, who will ideally be in a position to integrate such findings with the medical and family history and the physical examination, taking into account the psychological state of the patient and the patient’s family. While we recognize that this ideal may not always be realized, this is nonetheless a very different scenario than the disclosure of sequence information outside of the medical care system. The return of incidental findings discovered in the course of a clinical laboratory investigation is consistent with such practices in other disciplines of medicine.
