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Knowing Your History: Hereditary Cancer
By admin | November 17, 2007
Last time, I’ve talked about healthy living to help prevent certain cancers. I can’t stress its importance enough especially if cancer is in your family. I was a biology major in college. There’s a family of cancer victims here in my area — everyone’s afflicted with different types of cancer, from grandparents to grandchildren. My professor said whole families afflicted with cancer are quite rare though they’re perfectly possible (unfortunately). What does this mean? It means hereditary cancer is existent and most definitely, not a myth. And yes, you can inherit cancer from your ancestors.
First thing you should know is why this happens. When someone comes from a clan with cancerous members a gene mutation has taken place in their body. This doesn’t mean you automatically have cancer. Instead, the risk of having cancer is far higher than others. Knowing this, if there are instances of cancers in your family, your best bet would be to undergo genetic testing. First off, you’d need to undergo genetic counseling, wherein experts would study the cases of cancers in your family. It all depends on the counselor’s decision whether you should undergo genetic testing.
Genetic testing is a series of laboratory tests to measure out the risk of any disease (in this case, cancer) of one person. Knowing that your risk to cancer is high, you can then seek to improve the quality of your life and try your hardest to avoid inflicting the disease. There are different types of cancer subject to genetic inheritance. These are breast cancer, prostate cancer, ovarian cancer and colorectal cancer. So if there are several instances of family being afflicted with such, taking proper precaution is advised for safety measure. It will be hard at first, but at least, there’s no one else who’d benefit from it in the long run but you.
Topics: Early Detection, Prevention |
November 24th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
[…] Knowing Your History: Hereditary Cancer […]
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