Abstract
This chapter deals with a topic whose importance is too often ignored with respect to Ethical Counselling: probability. Probability, indeed, is at the core of many ethical decisions encountered in the age of molecular medicine, as in the case, for example, of carrier tests or predictive and presymptomatic tests, or whenever survival rates are at issue. Thus, understanding correctly the probabilistic information is extremely important and crucial and an ethical counsellor cannot be unprovided with such knowledge.
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Notes
- 1.
The penetrance is the percentage of individuals carrying a particular variant of a gene (allele or genotype) that expresses an associated trait (i.e. phenotype), which can be also a pathological trait. The penetrance is complete if all individuals who have the disease-causing mutation have clinical symptoms of the disease. It can be incomplete if some individuals do not express the trait, even though they carry the allele.
- 2.
The prevalence is the percentage of a population found to have a condition (a disease or a risk factor). It differs from incidence, which is a measure of the new cases arising in a population over a given period (month, year, etc.). Prevalence is an answer for: “How many individuals in this population have this disease now?”. Incidence is an answer for: “How many individuals in this population acquire this disease per month/year?”.
- 3.
Of course if P(D) = prevalence, then P(wD) = 1 − P(D) = 1 − prevalence.
- 4.
It is the dimeric form of the pyruvate kinase isoenzyme type M2.
- 5.
Since 90 % is 0.9, 0.9 ∙ 0.9 ∙ 0.9 = 0.729, that is, 72.9 %.
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Boniolo, G., Teira Serrano, D. (2016). The Centrality of Probability. In: Boniolo, G., Sanchini, V. (eds) Ethical Counselling and Medical Decision-Making in the Era of Personalised Medicine. SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27690-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27690-8_6
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