Decoding Hereditary Colorectal Cancer

This year, colorectal cancer will strike about 150,000 people in the United States and 500,000 worldwide. Much of the morbidity and mortality of the disease could be prevented if we knew more about the risk of colorectal cancer developing and were able to take effective preemptive action.About 3 to 4 percent of cases of colorectal cancer occur in the familial cancer syndromes. The commonest of these is the Lynch syndrome (also called hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer), which is caused by a germ-line mutation in one of four DNA mismatch-repair genes.1 The identification of patients with the Lynch syndrome is . . .