Daniel Kwon, MD, discusses study’s impact on veteran access to germline testing for prostate cancer

In this video, Daniel Kwon, MD, discusses the impact of the JNCI Cancer Spectrum paper, “Germline testing for veterans with advanced prostate cancer: concerns about service-connected benefits." Kwon is an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Transcription:

Your research led to changes in the Veterans Benefits Administration Compensation and Pension Manual. How do you anticipate these changes will affect veterans' decisions about genetic testing in the future?

I'm hopeful that the decisions are more informed in terms of actual science. The science does not suggest that just because you have a service-connected prostate cancer related to Agent Orange or something, and you also have a hereditary connection between something you inherited and your prostate cancer, that for some reason, this genetic factor should nullify the service connection. It doesn't make sense. And so hopefully, now that this is reflected in language in the compensation and pension manual, that veterans are more reassured and with more sound information, they are more likely to participate in genetic testing as long as they go through the consent process and it's still in line with what they wish. Now, that's still quite a huge jump to get from just words on a page to veterans actually making decisions and changing behavior. So what's going on is that there is a dissemination plan from a lot of us in the VA genomics field advisory board, and we're trying to develop this plan to figure out what's the best way to get the word out there and implement the change that it leads to changes in behavior and decisions. So we're talking with various stakeholders at the VA, including patient advocacy groups, other physicians, leadership, to come up with this plan as we speak.

This transcript was AI generated and edited by human editors for clarity.