The Johns Hopkins Oncology Center other research news

Johns Hopkins researchers in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and colleagues published in Nature Genetics the identification of a mutation in the APC gene (previously implicated in familial adenomatous polyposis) that is associated with increased risk of inherited colorectal cancer in Ashkenazi Jewish individuals.

The mutation is found in 6 percent of all healthy Ashkenazi Jews (versus 0 percent of non-Jewish healthy subjects, p<0.0001), in 10.4 percent of Ashkenazi patients tested who had colorectal cancer, and in 28 percent of Ashkenazim with a family history of colorectal cancer. The researchers estimated that the mutation confers a lifetime risk of colorectal cancer of 18-30 percent. ...