Cancers and genetics

 Cancers are genetic due to a genetic process that happens in a cell that allows that cell to grow uncontrollably into a cancerous cell but not all cancers are hereditary, only about 10% of all cancer diagnoses are due to a hereditary reason.

The more common types of hereditary cancers include cancers such as,

• Breast cancer
• pancreatic colorectal prostate cancer
• stomach cancers
• about 20 to 25 percent of ovarian cancers are due to hereditary reasons.

 while most cancer is not hereditary. Different diagnoses can make us more suspicious that there is a hereditary predisposition to cancer in a family. So genetic testing is either a blood test or a saliva sample that gets sent to a laboratory and the lab is looking for changes or alterations in the genes that may increase an individual's risk for cancer all cancer is a genetic process and it's actually due to what we call a mutation in a gene that lives in a cell and that mutation although sometimes can be inherited most of the time it's not that mutation is typically acquired either through environmental exposures or sometimes just a sporadic process but that mutation allows the gene in the cell to grow uncontrollably into a cancerous cell or a tumor.

If you're trying to figure out what genetic testis the best option for you it's best to speak with a certified genetic counselor who can speak with you regarding your personal and family history and address your concerns they also are trained professionals and based on their risk assessment can determine whether genetic testing is right for you and what test would be the best test for you genetic counselors can also help to coordinate that testing and most importantly can interpret those results for you and your family members so that you can use those results in an actionable way so if you have an abnormal genetic test result for hereditary cancer it does not mean that you would automatically develop cancer but it does mean that your risk is at a higher risk when we compared your risk to the population that's really important because if we know there's a higher risk we actually want to do something about that there are different screening measures different surgical interventions that individuals can take to help reduce that risk or help screen for cancer earlier better and more often than what's typically offered in the population