Background: Women who are genetically predisposed to ovarian cancer are at very high risk of developing this disease. Although
risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy (RRSO) and various screening ...regimens are currently recommended to reduce ovarian cancer
risk, the optimal management strategy has not been established nor have multiple additional issues been adequately addressed.
We developed a collaboration among the Clinical Genetics Branch (National Cancer Institute's Intramural Research Program),
the Gynecologic Oncology Group (GOG), and the Cancer Genetics Network to address these issues.
Methods: This is a prospective, international, two-cohort, nonrandomized study of women at genetic risk of ovarian cancer,
who chose either to undergo RRSO or screening, at study enrollment. Primary study objectives include quantifying and comparing
ovarian and breast cancer incidence in the two study groups, assessing feasibility and selected performance characteristics
of a novel ovarian cancer screening strategy (the Risk of Ovarian Cancer Algorithm), evaluating various aspects of quality
of life and nononcologic morbidity related to various interventions in at-risk women, and creating a biospecimen repository
for subsequent translational research.
Results: Study accrual is complete as of November 2006; 2,605 participants enrolled: 1,030 (40%) into the surgical cohort
and 1,575 (60%) into the screening cohort. Five years of prospective follow-up ends in November 2011. Verification of BRCA mutation carrier status is under way, either through patient-provided reports from clinical genetic testing done before enrollment
or through research-based genetic testing being conducted as part of the protocol. Patient eligibility is currently under
evaluation and baseline, surgical, pathology, and outcome data are still being collected. The study design and selected baseline
characteristics of cohort members are summarized.
Conclusion: This National Cancer Institute intramural/extramural collaboration will provide invaluable prospectively collected
observational data on women at high familial ovarian cancer risk, including substantial numbers of women carrying BRCA1/2 mutations. These data will aid in elucidating the effect of RRSO on breast/ovarian cancer risk and the effects of two management
strategies, on quality of life and other issues that may influence patient care, as well as providing preliminary estimates
of test specificity and positive predictive value of a novel ovarian cancer screening strategy. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers
Prev 2008;17(3):594–604)
The limited data on cancer phenotypes in men with germline BRCA1 and BRCA2 pathogenic variants (PVs) have hampered the development of evidence-based recommendations for early cancer detection and ...risk reduction in this population.
To compare the cancer spectrum and frequencies between male BRCA1 and BRCA2 PV carriers.
Retrospective cohort study of 6902 men, including 3651 BRCA1 and 3251 BRCA2 PV carriers, older than 18 years recruited from cancer genetics clinics from 1966 to 2017 by 53 study groups in 33 countries worldwide collaborating through the Consortium of Investigators of Modifiers of BRCA1/2 (CIMBA). Clinical data and pathologic characteristics were collected.
BRCA1/2 status was the outcome in a logistic regression, and cancer diagnoses were the independent predictors. All odds ratios (ORs) were adjusted for age, country of origin, and calendar year of the first interview.
Among the 6902 men in the study (median range age, 51.6 18-100 years), 1634 cancers were diagnosed in 1376 men (19.9%), the majority (922 of 1,376 67%) being BRCA2 PV carriers. Being affected by any cancer was associated with a higher probability of being a BRCA2, rather than a BRCA1, PV carrier (OR, 3.23; 95% CI, 2.81-3.70; P < .001), as well as developing 2 (OR, 7.97; 95% CI, 5.47-11.60; P < .001) and 3 (OR, 19.60; 95% CI, 4.64-82.89; P < .001) primary tumors. A higher frequency of breast (OR, 5.47; 95% CI, 4.06-7.37; P < .001) and prostate (OR, 1.39; 95% CI, 1.09-1.78; P = .008) cancers was associated with a higher probability of being a BRCA2 PV carrier. Among cancers other than breast and prostate, pancreatic cancer was associated with a higher probability (OR, 3.00; 95% CI, 1.55-5.81; P = .001) and colorectal cancer with a lower probability (OR, 0.47; 95% CI, 0.29-0.78; P = .003) of being a BRCA2 PV carrier.
Significant differences in the cancer spectrum were observed in male BRCA2, compared with BRCA1, PV carriers. These data may inform future recommendations for surveillance of BRCA1/2-associated cancers and guide future prospective studies for estimating cancer risks in men with BRCA1/2 PVs.
With limitations in early detection and poor treatment response, ovarian cancer is associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Up to 25% of epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is related to a ...hereditary predisposition. Current National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines recommend that all individuals diagnosed with EOC be offered germline genetic testing. Although this would ideally be performed by genetics professionals, a shortage of genetic counselors can affect timely access to these services. This study sought to investigate the current genetic testing practices of oncology providers to determine the feasibility of oncologist-led genetic testing for patients with EOC.
A survey was distributed to members of the Society of Gynecologic Oncologists with questions regarding timing, frequency, and type of cancer genetic testing, referrals to genetics professionals, confidence with aspects of genetic testing, and any barriers to these processes.
We received 170 evaluable responses. Eighty-five percent of providers always ordered genetic testing for patients with EOC. Most providers ordered germline multigene panel testing (95.8%), generally at diagnosis (64.5%). Provider confidence with the genetic testing process was generally high and significantly differed by providers' testing practices, namely, respondents who reported always ordering genetic testing tended to be more confident in ordering testing (
= .008), interpreting results (
= .005), and counseling a patient (
= .002). Patient disinterest and concerns for insurance coverage were commonly cited as barriers to testing and referrals.
The findings from this study suggest that oncologist-led genetic testing for patients with EOC, with referrals to genetics professionals when appropriate, has the potential to be a viable alternative service delivery model to increase access to genetic testing for patients diagnosed with EOC.
Knowledge of family cancer history is essential for estimating an individual's cancer risk and making clinical recommendations regarding screening and referral to a specialty cancer genetics clinic. ...However, it is not clear if reported family cancer history is sufficiently accurate for this purpose.
In the population-based 2001 Connecticut Family Health Study, 1019 participants reported on 20 578 first-degree relatives (FDR) and second-degree relatives (SDR). Of those, 2605 relatives were sampled for confirmation of cancer reports on breast, colorectal, prostate, and lung cancer. Confirmation sources included state cancer registries, Medicare databases, the National Death Index, death certificates, and health-care facility records. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value were calculated for reports on lung, colorectal, breast, and prostate cancer and after stratification by sex, age, education, and degree of relatedness and used to estimate report accuracy. Pairwise t tests were used to evaluate differences between the two strata in each stratified analysis. All statistical tests were two-sided.
Overall, sensitivity and positive predictive value were low to moderate and varied by cancer type: 60.2% and 40.0%, respectively, for lung cancer reports, 27.3% and 53.5% for colorectal cancer reports, 61.1% and 61.3% for breast cancer reports, and 32.0% and 53.4% for prostate cancer reports. Specificity and negative predictive value were more than 95% for all four cancer types. Cancer history reports on FDR were more accurate than reports on SDR, with reports on FDR having statistically significantly higher sensitivity for prostate cancer than reports on SDR (58.9% vs 21.5%, P = .002) and higher positive predictive value for lung (78.1% vs 31.7%, P < .001), colorectal (85.8% vs 43.5%, P = .004), and breast cancer (79.9% vs 53.6%, P = .02).
General population reports on family history for the four major adult cancers were not highly accurate. Efforts to improve accuracy are needed in primary care and other health-care settings in which family history is collected to ensure appropriate risk assessment and clinical care recommendations.
Risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy (RRSO) and ovarian cancer screening (OCS) are management options for women at increased risk of ovarian cancer. Long-term effects of these interventions on quality ...of life (QOL) are not well understood.
GOG-0199 is a prospective cohort study of women at increased ovarian cancer risk who chose either RRSO or OCS as their risk management intervention. At study entry, 6, 12, 24 and 60 months of follow-up, participants completed the QOL questionnaire, which included the Medical Outcome Study Short Form-36, the Impact of Events Scales, the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy – Endocrine Subscale, and the Sexual Activity Questionnaire. QOL measures were compared between the RRSO and OCS cohort at baseline and over time.
Five-hundred-sixty-two participants in the RRSO cohort and 1,010 in the OCS completed the baseline and at least one follow-up questionnaire. At baseline, participants selecting RRSO reported lower health-related QOL (HRQOL), greater ovarian cancer-related stress, greater anxiety, and more depressive symptomatology, which improved during follow-up, especially for ovarian cancer-related stress. Screening was not found to adversely impact HRQOL. Hormone-related menopausal symptoms worsened and sexual functioning declined during follow-up in both cohorts, but more so among participants who underwent RRSO.
HRQOL improved after surgery among women who chose RRSO and remained stable among participants undergoing screening. The adverse effects of RRSO and screening on short-term and long-term sexual activity and sexual functioning warrant consideration in the decision-making process for high-risk women.
•Ovarian cancer screening did not adversely impact health-related Quality of Life.•Health-related QOL improved during follow-up for participants selecting RRSO.•Ovarian cancer-related stress improved after RRSO.•No adverse effects of RRSO or OCS on psychological and emotional well-being.
The success of multisite collaborative research relies on effective data collection, harmonization, and aggregation strategies. Data Coordination Centers (DCC) serve to facilitate the implementation ...of these strategies. The utility of a DCC can be particularly relevant for research on rare diseases where collaboration from multiple sites to amass large aggregate datasets is essential. However, approaches to building a DCC have been scarcely documented.
The Li-Fraumeni Exploration (LiFE) Consortium's DCC was created using multiple open source packages, including LAM/G Application (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Grails), Extraction-Transformation-Loading (ETL) Pentaho Data Integration Tool, and the Saiku-Mondrian client. This document serves as a resource for building a rare disease DCC for multi-institutional collaborative research.
The primary scientific and technological objective to create an online central repository into which data from all participating sites could be deposited, harmonized, aggregated, disseminated, and analyzed was completed. The cohort now include 2,193 participants from six contributing sites, including 1,354 individuals from families with a pathogenic or likely variant in
. Data on cancer diagnoses are also available. Challenges and lessons learned are summarized.
The methods leveraged mitigate challenges associated with successfully developing a DCC's technical infrastructure, data harmonization efforts, communications, and software development and applications.
These methods can serve as a framework in establishing other collaborative research efforts. Data from the consortium will serve as a great resource for collaborative research to improve knowledge on, and the ability to care for, individuals and families with Li-Fraumeni syndrome.
Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC), the most lethal form of breast cancer, has characteristics linked to higher risk of contralateral breast cancer. However, no large studies have examined risk of ...contralateral breast cancer following IBC. We calculated absolute risk of invasive contralateral breast cancer among 5,631 IBC and 174,634 comparably staged non-IBC first breast cancer cases who survived at least 2 months following diagnosis and were reported to 13 Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) registries between January 1, 1973 and December 31, 2006. We considered that contralateral cancers occurring within 2–23 months of first cancer diagnosis may more likely be metastatic/recurrent disease and those occurring 2 or more years after diagnosis independent primaries. Absolute risk of contralateral breast cancer was generally greater following IBC than regional/distant non-IBC, regardless of age and hormone receptor status of first cancer diagnosis. Much of the increase in absolute risk following IBC occurred within 2–23 months of first cancer diagnosis, while the risk for non-IBC occurred more gradually over time since diagnosis. For instance, among women first diagnosed before age 50, absolute risks following IBC and non-IBC were 4.9 vs. 1.1% at 2 years, 6.0 vs. 2.2% at 5 years, and 7.7 vs. 6.1% at 20 years after diagnosis. However, patterns of higher risk following IBC than non-IBC were also evident for at least 10–15 years in the subcohort of women who survived at least 24 months without a contralateral cancer. In conclusion, our results suggest that IBC has higher risk of cancer in the contralateral breast than comparably staged non-IBC, possibly due to both metastatic/recurrent disease and independent primaries.
Familial testicular germ cell tumours (TGCTs) and bilateral TGCTs comprise 1-2% and 5% of all TGCTs, respectively, but their genetic basis remains largely unknown.
To investigate the contribution of ...known testicular cancer risk variants in familial and bilateral TGCTs.
The study genotyped 106 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in four regions (BAK1, DMRT1, KITLG, TERT-CLPTM1L) previously identified from genome-wide association studies of TGCT, including risk single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) rs210138 (BAK1), rs755383 (DMRT1), rs4635969 (TERT-CLPTM1L) in 97 cases with familial TGCT and 22 affected individuals with sporadic bilateral TGCT as well as 871 controls. Using a generalised estimating equations method that takes into account blood relationships among cases, the associations with familial and bilateral TGCT were analysed. Three previously identified risk SNPs were found to be associated with familial and bilateral TGCT (rs210138: OR 1.80, CI 1.35 to 2.41, p=7.03×10(-5); rs755383: OR 1.67, CI 1.23 to 2.22, p=6.70×10(-4); rs4635969: OR 1.59, CI 1.16 to 2.19, p=4.07×10(-3)). Evidence for a second independent association was found for an SNP in TERT (rs4975605: OR 1.68, CI 1.23 to 2.29, p=1.24×10(-3)). Another association with an SNP was identified in KITLG (rs2046971: OR 2.33, p=1.28×10(-3)); this SNP is in high linkage disequilibrium (LD) with reported risk variant rs995030.
This study provides evidence for replication of recent genome-wide association studies results and shows that variants in or near BAK1, DMRT1, TERT-CLPTM1L, and KITLG predispose to familial and bilateral TGCT. These findings imply that familial TGCT and sporadic TGCT share a common genetic basis.
Li-Fraumeni syndrome (LFS) is associated with germline
mutations and a very high lifetime cancer risk. Algorithms that assess a patient's risk of inherited cancer predisposition are often used in ...clinical counseling. The existing LFS criteria have limitations, suggesting the need for an advanced prediction tool to support clinical decision making for
mutation testing and LFS management.
Based on a Mendelian model, LFSPRO estimates
mutation probability through the Elston-Stewart algorithm and consequently estimates future risk of cancer. With independent datasets of 1,353 tested individuals from 867 families, we evaluated the prediction performance of LFSPRO.
LFSPRO accurately predicted
mutation carriers in a pediatric sarcoma cohort from MD Anderson Cancer Center in the United States, the observed to expected ratio (OE) = 1.35 (95% confidence interval, 0.99-1.80); area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) = 0.85 (0.75-0.93); a population-based sarcoma cohort from the International Sarcoma Kindred Study in Australia, OE = 1.62 (1.03-2.55); AUC = 0.67 (0.54-0.79); and the NCI LFS study cohort, OE = 1.28 (1.17-1.39); AUC = 0.82 (0.78-0.86). LFSPRO also showed higher sensitivity and specificity than the classic LFS and Chompret criteria. LFSPRO is freely available through the R packages LFSPRO and BayesMendel.
LFSPRO shows good performance in predicting
mutations in individuals and families in varied situations.
LFSPRO is more broadly applicable than the current clinical criteria and may improve clinical management for individuals and families with LFS.
.
To define the frequency with which adult research participants consent to be offered clinically validated research genetic test results (RR) and incidental findings (IF).
Consents were obtained from ...506 adults enrolled in one of three studies within the National Cancer Institute Clinical Genetics Branch’s Familial Cancer Research Program. A cross-sectional analysis was performed involving the choices indicated on study consents regarding receipt of RR and IF.
Ninety-seven percent opted to receive RR and IF. Participants who declined (n = 16) included two cancer survivors who were mutation-positive (1 = RR and 1 = both), eight who knew their primary mutation status (3 = RR; 4 = IF; 1 = both), three nonbloodline relatives (1 = RR; 2 = both), one untested but with the syndromic phenotype (1 = IF), and two parents of an affected child (2 = both). We speculate that these individuals either already had sufficient information, were not prepared to learn more, or felt that the information would not change their personal health-care decision making.
Adult research participants from families at high genetic risk for cancer overwhelmingly indicated their preference to receive both RR and IF. Future research will seek to identify the reasons for declining RR and IF and to study the impact of receipt of RR and IF on personal medical decision making.
Genet Med18 12, 1218–1225.
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