Genetic Testing Underused for GI Cancers (eg. BRCA vs Lynch syndrome)

Clinical Oncology News
  Drs. Idos and Yurgelun reported a financial relationship with Myriad.

The new findings come from a subanalysis of an ongoing multicenter, prospective clinical trial that is evaluating the clinical utility of multigene panels. The trial recruited 2,000 patients who had been referred for a 25-gene multigene panel test at three medical centers in California between August 2014 and June 2015. Patients with a 2.5% or greater probability of an identifiable mutation were invited to participate in the study. The panel tested 25 genes including BRCA1/2, EPCAM and MLH1 (Table).
Observing that there were few referrals for GI cancers during the interim analysis of this study, the researchers set out to quantify the extent of the problem. In an analysis of 500 patients, almost twice as many patients received genetic testing for a primary workup of HBOC as for a workup of GI cancer syndromes (66.4% vs. 28.8%)....