Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Randomized trial of a decision aid for BRCA1/BRCA2 mutation carriers: impact on measures of decision making and satisfaction.
Genetic testing is increasingly part of routine clinical care for women with a family history of breast cancer. Given their substantially elevated risk for breast cancer, BRCA1/BRCA2 mutation carriers must make the difficult decision whether or not to opt for risk reducing mastectomy. To help BRCA1/2 carriers make this decision, the authors developed a computer-based interactive decision aid that was tested against usual care in a randomized controlled trial. ⋯ These results demonstrate that BRCA1/BRCA2 mutation carriers who are having difficulty making a breast cancer risk management decision can benefit from adjunct decision support.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Illness schema activation and attentional bias to coping procedures.
Relatively little research to date has directly addressed the schematic nature of illness representations proposed by H. Leventhal, J. Weinman, and L. A. Phillips' (1980) common sense model of illness. The present experiments tested the hypothesis that coping information is schematically encoded within the representations of a specific illness. ⋯ Activation of a schematic representation of illness may automatically activate information related to coping procedures encoded in memory with the illness.
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Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) reflects a prolonged stress reaction and dysregulation of the stress response system and is hypothesized to increase risk of developing coronary heart disease (CHD). No study has tested this hypothesis in women even though PTSD is more prevalent among women than men. This study aims to examine whether higher levels of PTSD symptoms are associated with increased risk of incident CHD among women. ⋯ PTSD symptoms may have damaging effects on physical health for civilian community-dwelling women, with high levels of PTSD symptoms associated with increased risk of CHD-related morbidity and mortality.