Limiting inherited-gene testing to younger cancer patients could miss most people who carry a harmful variant, according to a Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center study of 39,184 patients announced Oct. 8 by the American Association for Cancer Research. An under-50 testing cutoff would have excluded 4,601 carriers, or 72% of everyone with a harmful inherited variant.
The study, published in the AACR journal Cancer Discovery, tested every patient with a solid tumor regardless of age. Overall, 16.3% carried at least one harmful germline variant, the kind passed down through families.
