Call me old fashioned, but I would rather be ignorant of my chances of cancer (even if showing me allows me to live longer). I know getting a high percentage would just cause me lots of anxiety throughout the rest of my life. I'm rather happy not knowing, living in peace, and dying sooner.
If I knew I was at "higher risk" for certain kinds of cancer (which BTW typically means, say, a 10-30% increase on some very small baseline risk, say 1 in 1,000 -- and for only a few cancer types), my reaction would be to make peace with it --
-- and to make a note to myself to get screened more often. So then (in the small chance) that it hits, I know I will have done everything possible to shield my loved ones from the shock of facing my imminent departure, when we could in fact be using the foreknowledge to stretch my relatively pain- and incapacitation-free interval out to its utter maximum.
Being as, whenever you've stared down that window in a loved one (and nearly everyone will at some point in their lives) -- the difference between 6 months versus 6 weeks (or something much smaller, depending on how the final phases play out) can make a huge -- sometimes life changing difference for those around you.
I suffer from severe hypochondria. If I did this test and found out I have a higher change of developing some kind of cancer, I don't think I would be able to sleep well again for the rest of my life.
