-: I'm Tara Schmidlen,
I'm a genetic counselor and clinical investigator
at Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania.
I'll back up and say a genetic counselor to start with
is a person who helps individuals understand,
act on, and adapt to genetic risk information for a disease.
So most genetic counselors work
in a hospital or clinic setting,
talking to patients or families with a risk for
disease either in the setting of pregnancy.
They may also work in the cancer setting,
might work in pediatric care,
just trying to understand genetic causes for disease
and contributions to disease risk for families.
So we meet with patients and take
a family and medical history,
we do a risk assessment.
We share with them what the potential causes for the disease
or condition of interest may be,
what their options are,
if genetic testing should be warranted.
We coordinate that genetic testing if that's necessary.
We help them understand the results of the testing,
and then we also talk them through
who else in their family might be
impacted by this genetic information.
So I work in the cancer and cardiology setting
at Geisinger Health Systems.
So we have patients with strong family histories of cancer,
so people with breast cancer
or ovarian cancer in their family,
cancers happening before the age of 50.
So we look for different patterns of cancer,
ages of onset are another red flag
that we would look at to determine
who might have a greater risk,
who might benefit from additional screening
or earlier intervention to lower their risk.
On the cardiology side of things,
you know, people, we look at people
who've had a history of early heart attack,
people who have really high cholesterol.
That's a red flag for something called
familial hypercholesterolemia,
it's a very common disease.
So we look at, you know, people's medical history
and their family history to try and see
do they meet that picture because they might need
more than just a statin drug.
They might need some additional medications,
and they might need to be followed
a little bit more closely.
In addition to connecting them to
sort of the medical next steps,
we also try to connect them as much as we can
to other patients or other families
who might have been sort of down this road before.
Because we understand that getting this information
has a psychological impact,
so we want to make sure people are taken care of
both physiologically and psychologically.