When people talk about ovarian cancer diagnoses, it is usually the case that a family history of the disease propelled women to get screened to see if they had it themselves. Unfortunately, a new study from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis reveals that a family history of the disease is not at all sufficient for determining your own chances of getting ovarian cancer.
Researchers studied 429 women with ovarian cancer, “without regard to whether the women had family histories of breast cancer, ovarian cancer or rare cancer syndromes, all of which can increase the odds of developing ovarian tumors. The women ranged in age from 26 to 89, and 90 percent were Caucasian.” Their findings were striking: 1 in 5 women has an inherited predisposition to ovarian cancer, with a total of 222 inherited genetic variants identified that increase the risk of developing the disease.
As senior author Li Ding, PhD, assistant director at The Genome Institute at the School of Medicine and a research member of Siteman Cancer Center, explains, “Using advanced genomic analysis, we found that 20 percent of women with ovarian cancer had inherited mutations in a gene pathway known to be important in inherited breast and ovarian cancer. That number seems pretty high. This tells us that we need to find better ways to screen women for ovarian cancer, even if they don’t have family histories of the disease.”
