Genetic Counseling
The past year has been an exciting time for medical applications of genetic testing. We are entering an era when germline genetic status is no longer focused solely on risk stratification to guide surveillance and risk-reducing options, but is increasingly influencing treatment selection.
In 2010, FORCE: Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered successfully spearheaded passage of a congressional resolution declaring the first-ever National Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer week.
Cristi Radford, MS, CGC, and Michele Gabree, MS, CGC, explain what variants of uncertain significance are, and address some of the questions that are frequently asked by providers.
Similar to other disease sites, prostate cancer has seen a surge in genetic testing options. To help address the role of genetic testing in prostate cancer disease management, the NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology were updated in February 2018 to include germline recommendations.
Lynch syndrome is a hereditary cancer syndrome that places individuals at an increased risk for colorectal, endometrial, stomach, ovarian, urothelial, and other cancers.
One of the challenges of improving cancer care is the integration of genetic risk assessment into survivorship care.
PARP inhibitors were the first class of drugs specifically developed to treat BRCA-related tumors by targeting the DNA repair pathway. Although they were developed more than a decade ago, the FDA only granted approval for their clinical use a few years ago.
Screening of colorectal cancer (CRC) tumors for mismatch repair (MMR) deficiency has been shown to increase the identification of patients with Lynch syndrome.
Parents with inherited cancer mutations often wonder when to disclose results to their children and what affect it will have on them.
Advances in technology and decreased testing costs have led to a rise in the number of genes associated with inherited cancer risk for which testing is clinically available.