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A study of nearly 45,000 pairs of twins in the Swedish, Danish and Finnish twin registers that asked how much of ordinary cancer is inherited. For most cancers the answer was a minor share: the environment, in the broad sense of everything that is not inherited, played the larger part.
Led from the Department of Medical Epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet, the study combined 44,788 twin pairs from the three Nordic twin registers, linked to the national cancer registers, to estimate the risk of cancer at 28 sites in the twin of an affected person, and modelled the relative contributions of heritable and environmental factors at 11 sites. At least one cancer occurred in 10,803 people among 9,512 pairs. It depended on twin registers and national cancer registers that can be linked person by person.
It is the reason a family history matters for some cancers and not much for others, and it supports prevention: if most of the risk is not inherited, much of it can in principle be changed. The larger heritability for prostate, colorectal and breast cancer pointed at genetic risk that later genome-wide studies and polygenic scores set out to find.
Shares Karolinska University Hospital, New England Journal of Medicine, Colorectal cancer.
Shares Inherited risk is mostly unidentified, Colorectal cancer.
Shares Inherited risk is mostly unidentified, New England Journal of Medicine, Prostate cancer.
Shares Karolinska University Hospital, New England Journal of Medicine, Prostate cancer.
Shares Inherited risk is mostly unidentified, Prostate cancer, Colorectal cancer.
Shares Karolinska University Hospital, Prostate cancer, Colorectal cancer.
Shares Inherited risk is mostly unidentified, Prostate cancer, Colorectal cancer.
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