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MIRACLES AND MISADVENTURES IN MODERN MEDICINE

Genetic Diagnosis of Cancer: Exercise 1

Miracles Home Assessment Timetable

A short practicum

Construct a pedigree from the following history:

Tom is a 41 year old man seen in the family cancer clinic because he has recently been diagnosed as having adenomatous polyposis coli. His disease had come to light because he had been investigated for tiredness, and found to have an advanced cancer of the large bowel. At that time, he was also noted to have widespread benign tumours (adenomas) covering much of the lining of his bowel. Tom is married to Jade, with a daughter Sky, aged 13, and a son Robert, aged 12.

On questioning, it was found that Tom has a significant history of cancer in his family.

His brother Jack, who was 8 years older, had died of "liver cancer" when he was 43, while his only other sibling, his sister Ethel, was apparently well at age 39. His sister was married to Yuri, with two boys, Istvan and Marek, aged 14 and 10 respectively. His older brother had been survived by his wife Maria, and his identical twin daughters, Anna and Irma, aged 10.

Toms mother Joyce was alive and well at the age of 69, as was her brother, Tom’s uncle Frank (64). Her older sister, Toms Aunt Maude, had recently died of breast cancer, at the age of 74.

Toms parents had emigrated to Australia from England in 1956. Approximately two years prior to that, Tom’s father Henry had undergone an extensive operation on his bowel for a "growth". He had been well until 1963, when he developed bowel cancer and died two years later, at the age of 38.

Tom knew little of his paternal grandparents, but said that his father was brought up as an only child, and that his mother, Toms paternal grandmother Matilda, had died shortly after the birth of her first son. His maternal grandparents had died in the mid 1970s, his grandfather Rupert of a heart attack at the age of 82, his grandmother Mildred of a stroke at the same age some three years later.


Pedigree for Exercise 1

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