Project Summary/Abstract - The Risk Evaluation and Education for Alzheimer's Disease (REVEAL) Study is an ongoing series of multi-site randomized controlled trials that provide empirical data to address ethical, social and translational issues in genetic susceptibility testing for common diseases. Such work has become increasingly important given the expansion of genome-wide association studies identifying genetic risk factors for common diseases and corresponding efforts to commercialize genetic testing using these markers.

Psychiatric genetic research (PGR) holds great promise for preventing, understanding, and treating neuropsychiatric disorders - a source of immense societal burden and personal suffering. Such research poses many ethical challenges, and failure to perform systematic study of the ethical issues surrounding PGR may threaten societal acceptance of this important scientific work. To date, NIH has not funded any work on PGR that focuses on collecting empirical data about ethical issues.