Incidental medical findings

Such findings may occur in a variety of settings, including routine medical care, during biomedical research,[1] during post-mortem autopsy,[2] or during genetic testing.

[3] An incidentaloma is a tumor found by coincidence which is often benign and does not cause any clinically significant symptoms; however a small percentage do turn out to be malignant.

Incidentalomas are common, with up to 7% of all patients over 60 harboring a benign growth,[citation needed] often of the adrenal gland, which is detected when diagnostic imaging is used for the analysis of unrelated symptoms.

[10][11] Unintentional genetic findings (aka "incidentalomes"[12]) are more commonly encountered with the advent of biomedical technologies capable of quickly and reliably performing genomic analysis, such as whole-genome sequencing.

As with medical imaging, the capacity to measure biologic information in the form of genetic variation may exceed the scientific understanding of what the findings mean.