Nature Communications (Oct 2017)

Inequality in genetic cancer risk suggests bad genes rather than bad luck

  • Mats Julius Stensrud,
  • Morten Valberg

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-01284-y
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8, no. 1
pp. 1 – 8

Abstract

Read online

Cancer heritability estimates can be obtained via decomposing trait variance into genetic and other factors. Here, the authors obtain the distribution of absolute genetic risk for 15 common cancers, and they use a number of metrics to show that the genetic risk varies considerably across individuals.