Many situational factors affect physicians’ beliefs about when genetic testing is appropriate. In a small survey of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals enrolled in a CME course on genetics (n=41), 80% approved of testing a 25 year-old patient who wanted to tell her fiancé if she was predisposed to Huntington’s Disease (HD); 20% of testing a 16 year-old who wanted to tell her fiancé whether she will develop HD, but whose mother believes she is too young to know; 43% of testing a 16 year-old who is simply curious about her risk for HD and has her mother’s support. Although caution is warranted in generalizing from these limited data, the maturity of the decision maker and the use to which the data will be put both appear to affect mental health professionals’ views on the appropriateness of testing. In the same survey 80% approved of APOE*4 testing of a 50 year-old man whose mother has Alzheimer’s disease and who is contemplating a major 10-year financial investment; and 60% approved testing a 21 year-old man whose grandfather died of Alzheimer’s
