Legislation of direct-to-consumer genetic testing in Europe: a fragmented regulatory landscape

Despite the increasing availability of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing, it is currently unclear how such services are regulated in Europe, due to the lack of EU or national legislation specifically addressing this issue. In this article, we provide an overview of laws that could potentially impact the regulation of DTC genetic testing in 26 European countries, namely Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Emphasis is placed on provisions relating to medical supervision, genetic counselling and informed consent. Our results indicate that currently there is a wide spectrum of laws regarding genetic testing in Europe. There are countries (e.g. France and Germany) which essentially ban DTC genetic testing, while in others (e.g. Luxembourg and Poland) DTC genetic testing may only be restricted by general laws, usually regarding health care services and patients’ rights

Is it adaptive to disengage from demands of social change? Adjustment to developmental barriers in opportunity-deprived regions

This paper investigates how individuals deal with demands of social and economic change in the domains of work and family when opportunities for their mastery are unfavorable. Theoretical considerations and empirical research suggest that with unattainable goals and unmanageable demands motivational disengagement and self-protective cognitions bring about superior outcomes than continued goal striving. Building on research on developmental deadlines, this paper introduces the concept of developmental barriers to address socioeconomic conditions of severely constrained opportunities in certain geographical regions. Mixed-effects methods were used to model cross-level interactions between individual-level compensatory secondary control and regional-level opportunity structures in terms of social indicators for the economic prosperity and family friendliness. Results showed that disengagement was positively associated with general life satisfaction in regions that were economically devastated and has less than average services for families. In regions that were economically well off and family-friendly, the association was negative. Similar results were found for self-protection concerning domain-specific satisfaction with life. These findings suggest that compensatory secondary control can be an adaptive way of mastering a demand when primary control is not possible

DOME: recommendations for supervised machine learning validation in biology

DOME is a set of community-wide recommendations for reporting supervised machine learning-based analyses applied to biological studies. Broad adoption of these recommendations will help improve machine learning assessment and reproducibility

Residence and Migration in Post-War Soviet Estonia: The Case of Russian-Born Estonians

Conventional research has used aggregate statistics and bivariate methods in studying migration in Soviet society and has stressed the critical role of a single (usually structural) determinant in an individual's migration. This research tests the dominant view, using individual level data and multivariate methods. The objective is to clarify the extent to which structural-environmental factors and the extent to which personal characteristics determined the first residence and migration of Russian-born Estonians in post-war Estonia. The data of the retrospective survey on 265 ethnic Estonians born in Russia between 1915 and 1969 and settled in Estonia between 1940 and 1988 are used. It appears that the first residence and migration of the ethnic Estonians was shaped by an immigration cohort - the variable reflecting structural-environmental conditions. However, several personal characteristics - age, earlier life-environment, language usage and education - also turned out to be important determinants of residence and migration of the ethnic Estonians. The results provide evidence to the view that migration in the Soviet Union was a complex outcome of interaction of structural forces and people's preferences, and therefore differed less from other parts of the world than often presumed. Copyright (c) 2003 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.