Is colon cancer hereditary?

Cancer is the world's most difficult and complicated disease, and one of the most pressing problems that contemporary medicine wants to overcome. The causes of cancer can be summarized into four categories: diet, lifestyle, environment, and genetics. Among these, the most concerned issue is the heredity of cancer.

The medical community has not yet reached a definitive conclusion on whether cancer is hereditary, but doctors tend to agree that it is. Of course, "hereditary" does not specifically refer to transmission through blood or kinship, but rather to the fact that the incidence of the same type of cancer within a family is significantly higher than that outside the family. There are many reasons for this, in addition to physiological genetic relationships, but more importantly, because a family has the same or similar living habits and living environment to a large extent, the chances of cancer are naturally more similar.

Whether cancer is hereditary has always been a controversial topic. However, what ordinary people are concerned about is which cancers are hereditary?

The following are the types of highly hereditary cancers that are generally recognized by the medical community:

Colorectal cancer

According to a survey, if parents in the family have colon cancer, the chances of their children developing the same type of cancer are as high as 50%.

Breast cancer

If a mother or sister has breast cancer in the family, the risk of her direct female relatives suffering from the disease is three times higher than that of women without a family history.

Lung cancer

If a close relative has lung cancer, the person's chance of developing lung cancer is much higher than the average person. If the person also smokes, the chance of developing lung cancer is 14 times higher than the average person.