Risk Perception and Psychological Strain in Women with a Family History of Breast Cancer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The thinking in health psychology is that patients' willingness to adopt preventive health behavior is contingent on their perceiving an increased risk of disease and is influenced by accompanying psychological stress. In counseling women with a family history of breast cancer, physicians focus on encouraging the patient to undergo early detection examinations as recommended. Therefore, it is essential to examine how women in this risk group perceive their own chances of developing breast cancer and to assess the psychological effects of their situation. MATERIAL AND METHODS: 129 women with at least one first or second degree relative who had developed breast cancer were enrolled in a questionnaire study. The object was to ascertain the extent to which these women may be expected to realistically estimate their own probability of contracting the disease and what influence risk perception and psychological strain have on their willingness to make use of diagnostic opportunities for early detection. Additionally, the effects on their physical and mental well-being were analyzed. RESULTS: Among the women of the study group, a family history of breast cancer did not always correlate with the subject's perception of an increased risk of contracting the disease compared. On the whole, the majority of the women overestimated their personal risk despite prior genetic counseling. Only slightly less than one quarter of the study group correctly estimated their risk; another quarter underestimated it. The majority of those women who exhibited an increased risk perception were also those who overestimated their probability of personally contracting the disease. They underwent recommended screening examinations significantly less often than women with a low risk perception. However, women subjected to intense psychological strain showed above-average participation in screening programs. CONCLUSIONS: Women with a family history of breast cancer often find it difficult to realistically estimate their own risk of contracting the disease. Increased risk perception had a negative effect on participation in recommended breast cancer screening. Therefore, an effort should be made to correct the patient's overestimation of her personal risk. Integrating psychological counseling in screening programs is essential considering that women from high-risk groups are subjected to increased psychological strain. Further studies are required to more precisely evaluate other psychosocial factors in the behavior of women in risk group toward screening.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".