Scottish researchers are reporting that they have developed a method that can identify in a much better manner to see if people are at risk of receiving types of hereditary colon cancer.
More than 100,000 new cases of colorectal cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States alone. Colon cancer is the third most common cancer. More than 55,000 Americans die each year from the disease.
“The method [we developed] allows rapid assessment of predicted likelihood that any given patient newly diagnosed with bowel cancer has a mutation,” said one of the study’s authors, Dr. Malcolm G. Dunlop, a professor of coloproctology and head of the Colon Cancer Genetics Group at Western General Hospital at the University of Edinburgh.
