Courtesy : bloomberg.com

While it has been known that ovarian and breast cancers run in families with a history of such cancers, scientists have now pinpointed inherited genetic susceptibility of 12 cancer types.

Some portion of the risk of developing cancer is hereditary and that inherited genetic errors are very important in some cancers but much less so in others.

In a new analysis, researchers have shed light on these hereditary elements across 12 cancer types – showing a surprising inherited component to stomach cancer and providing some needed clarity on the consequences of certain types of mutations in well-known breast cancer susceptibility genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2.

The study has appeared in the journal Nature Communications.

The investigators analysed genetic information from more than 4,000 cancer cases included in The Cancer Genome Atlas project, an initiative of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), to unravel the genetic basis of cancer.

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