So this is a paper led by Dr Deirdre O’Shea, who’s a neuropsychologist, assistant professor of neurology, is part of our larger center. And she’s very interested in epigenetics. And she led some of the studies that I’m going to be showing in some of my other presentations. But it was really important to understand what do people even know or understand about epigenetics and would they be willing to be tested? And so epigenetics is not a topic that’s so familiar to the common individual, common public...
So this is a paper led by Dr Deirdre O’Shea, who’s a neuropsychologist, assistant professor of neurology, is part of our larger center. And she’s very interested in epigenetics. And she led some of the studies that I’m going to be showing in some of my other presentations. But it was really important to understand what do people even know or understand about epigenetics and would they be willing to be tested? And so epigenetics is not a topic that’s so familiar to the common individual, common public. They’re somewhat familiar with the concept of genetics, but epigenetics gives us a very, very different picture, right? So Dr O’Shea created a survey and we surveyed a large number of individuals out in the community, both in urban and rural communities. So we got a wide array of people coming from different sort of takes and backgrounds on science and medicine. And we tried to tap into some of the things that potentially could lead people to agreeing to an epigenetic test and those things that might not. And we’re able to define some factors. And that’s important because we have a better understanding now, would people be willing to do this? What do they want to learn back from this test? And what we as researchers could have as deliverables back to the people who are agreeing to participate in epigenetic research. And I think that’s important because this is one of the first studies that really dived into this topic of epigenetics. We know people are scared of genetics. And so, you know, there’s a misunderstanding of what researchers can and can’t do with genetics. But I think as we move into other biomarkers, it’s important to also gain a sense of what people understand about this. And the advantage of our particular sample was it was quite diverse. So we had a good representation of African-Americans. We had a good representation of people who live in rural communities. And so we were able to sort of take their perspectives of some of the mistrust of medical institutions that exist in other communities and try to understand how that would affect someone’s willingness to participate in a research project. That helps us become better researchers and it helps us to be better at delivering information back to our research participants and the community.
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