deCODE Cancer

When it comes to fighting cancer, understanding risk underpins all of our tools: prevention, early detection and early intervention. The deCODE Cancer scan is a DNA-based test panel that measures risk for seven common cancers – colon, lung, bladder, thyroid and basal cell carcinoma, is well as breast and ovarian cancer in women and prostate and testicular cancer in men.

The deCODE Cancer Scan detects the same risk factors and markers included in our individual tests for:

Breast Cancer (deCODE BreastCancer™) and
Prostate Cancer (deCODE ProstateCancer™).

together with:

Basal Cell Carcinoma, Bladder Cancer, Colorectal Cancer, Lung Cancer, Ovarian Cancer, Testicular Cancer and Thyroid Cancer.

Bringing genetic risk into the picture.

Prevention, early detection and early intervention are the keys to fighting cancer and delivering the best outcomes for patients. And all are premised to a great degree upon accurately gauging individual risk and using that information to guide prevention and screening.

The common cancers result from the interplay of genetic predisposition and lifestyle and environmental risk factors.

Comprehensive risk assessment for tailored screening.

deCODE has led the world in the discovery of genetic markers, or SNPs, associated with risk of common cancers. Perhaps most important characteristic of these markers is that the risk they confer is to a great degree independent of that conferred by standard risk factors including age, family history and specific lifestyle factors.

By bringing in the genetic part of the risk equation, our scan can help to provide physicians with a more accurate and comprehensive risk assessment for each patient. Our cancer scan includes all of the risk markers detected by deCODE’s risk tests for specific cancers. deCODEhealth moreover provides the tools to seamlessly integrate genetic risk with other standard risk information, such as Gail scores for breast cancer and PSA scores for prostate cancer. Such an assessment can inform the development of the most appropriate prevention and screening strategies for each patient.

Many risk factors detected by the deCODE Cancer Scan apply only to people of European descent.

Most genetic studies of disease risk in the scientific literature have to date been based on populations of European ancestry. There are also a growing number of results for populations of Asian and African ancestry. For each of our products and for every disease for which we test risk variants we note the number of markers that have been validated for individuals of various continental ancestries.

This content was last reviewed on February 04, 2011.