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Mike Slabaugh doesn‘t have a stomach. Neither do his 10 cousins. Growing up, they watched helplessly as a rare hereditary stomach cancer killed their grandmother and some of their parents, aunts and uncles.
Risk the odds that they might not develop cancer, with a 70 percent chance they would; or have their stomachs removed. The latter would mean a challenging life of eating very little, very often.
"We‘re not only surviving, we‘re thriving," said Slabaugh 16 months after his operation at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto.
But what about people whose families don‘t have these rare, but powerful genetic defects? Experts say that someday, doctors may do DNA tests as routinely as they check cholesterol levels now, spotting disease risks that can be lowered. That day isn‘t here yet, but progress is being made.
By 2010, there might be several such tests, along with recommendations to help high-risk people avoid certain diseases, he said. (In fact, newborns are routinely tested now for some genetic conditions, but those tests generally focus on substances in the blood rather than DNA.)
