To better understand your risk of cancer, it helps to know your family health history.
Knowing if your parents, grandparents, siblings, and other close relatives have had cancer and at what age can help you and your providers assess your risk of certain cancers, personalize your cancer screening, and determine if you need genetic testing to reveal hereditary cancer conditions. It’s estimated that 5% to 10% of cancers are inherited in families.
To explore the role played by family health history in understanding your cancer risk, we turned to Lisa Ku, MS, CGC, lead genetic counselor of the Hereditary Cancer Program at the University of Colorado Anschutz Cancer Center and the UCHealth Hereditary Cancer Clinic in the Anschutz Cancer Pavilion; and Jan Lowery, PhD, MPH, the cancer center’s assistant director for dissemination and implementation in its Office of Community Outreach and Engagement (COE), which leads a number of cancer screening initiatives across Colorado.
→ More about cancer screening at the CU Anschutz Cancer Center.