Professionals’ views on providing personalized recurrence risks for de novo mutations: implications for genetic counseling

When an apparent de novo (new) genetic change has been identified as the cause of a serious genetic condition in a child, many couples would like to know the risk of this happening again in a future pregnancy. Current practice provides families with a population average risk of 1-2%. However, this figure is not accurate for any specific couple, and yet, they are asked to make decisions about having another child and/or whether to have prenatal testing. The PREcision Genetic Counselling And REproduction (PREGCARE) study is a new personalized assessment strategy that refines a couple’s recurrence risk prior to a new pregnancy, by analysing several samples from the parent-child trio (blood, saliva, swabs and father’s sperm) using Deep-Sequencing and haplotyping. Overall, this approach can reassure ~2/3 of couples who have a negligible (<0.1%) recurrence risk and focus support on those at higher risk (i.e. when mosaicism is identified in one of the parents). Here we present a qualitative interview study with UK clinical genetics professionals (n=20), which investigate the potential implications of introducing such a strategy in genetics clinics. While thematic analysis of the interviews indicated perceived clinical utility, it also indicates a need to prepare couples for the psychosocial implications of parent-of-origin information and to support their understanding of the assessment being offered. When dealing with personalized reproductive risk, a traditional non-directive approach may not meet the needs of practitioner and client(s) and shared decision-making provides an additional framework that may relieve some patient burden. Further qualitative investigation with couples is planned.