Table 4.

Implications for Practice: Key Areas for Clinicians to Explore With Patients That Might Improve Risk Assessment Communication and Disease Management Strategies

Constructs	Key Areas
Salience	Number of affected relatives
	Affected relative’s age at diagnosis or death
	Severity of illness: premature death or disability
	Acknowledging familial risk
	Influence of gender, class, ethnic group
	Living through relative’s illness experience
	Shared environment with affected relative
	Counting and discounting familial events
	Comparing similarities and differences with affected relatives
	Patterns within family history, eg, ages, gender, etc
Personalizing process	Models of health and illness
	Models of disease causation
	Models of inheritance
	Notions of bad luck and fatalism
Personal sense of vulnerability	Behavior change, eg, lifestyle risk factors
	Undergoing disease screening
	Acceptability of disease as illness or mode of death
	Continued anxiety