Cancer – Occurrence in Older Age

Transcript

As a general rule, when cancers occur for most tumor types after the age of 50 and especially 60, we traditionally just think of those as much more likely to be something that happened in your lifetime. So this sematic or sporadic process where it wasn’t germline, meaning it wasn’t a genetic or inherited process that was passed down to you. But instead it was something that occurred in your lifetime sporadically, or like a sematic mutation in your tissue. We are finding, there’s a little asterix on that. We’re finding that some cancers that are coming out, even in the fifties and sixties may be related to germline mutation, and that’s kind of the newer place that we’re at. And it’s very possible that the national guidelines will get a little looser or more liberal on when to do genetic testing. But if you have a grandmother or grandfather that had pancreatic cancer or lung cancer in their seventies or eighties, for the most part, that’s not probably something that was related in a family history or genetic way.