DOI: 10.1097/01.OTU.0000393800.41640.98

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Issn Print: 1742-8009

Publication Date: 2011/01/01


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Test for Lynch syndrome before cancer diagnosis

Peggy Eastman

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Excerpt

The Lynch syndrome is associated with increased risk for colorectal and endometrial cancers, and other less common cancers too. A study shows that genetic screening of people at risk of the syndrome – before any diagnosis of cancer – can be both cost-effective and have a high health outcome value.
Current genetic testing for Lynch syndrome – the most common heritable cause of colorectal cancer and a high risk factor for endometrial cancer – typically involves diagnostic testing of a patient with cancer before offering such genetic testing to other at-risk family members. But this approach puts the cart before the horse; a far better approach involves screening unaffected people selected by family histories and demographics prior to cancer diagnosis whose risks for carrying a Lynch syndrome mutation are above a selected threshold.
That is the conclusion of a new cancer prevention study that shows that primary genetic screening for Lynch syndrome not only has a high health-outcome value but can also be cost-effective.
The study – now available online in the AACR journal Cancer Prevention Research – shows that the cost-effectiveness of Lynch syndrome genetic testing in a wider population of at-risk people is similar to the cost effectiveness of mammography, said the study's corresponding author, Dr Stephen B Gruber, director for cancer prevention and control at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

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