Anticipating disaster: the genetics of familial pancreatic cancer.

To be born into a family with familial pancreatic cancer, an inheritable, autosomal dominant disorder, has various implications for an individual's life--and none is fortunate. The prospects just turned even darker because of "anticipation", the phenomenon that successive generations are affected by an inheritable disorder at a progressively earlier age. An up to date study shows that "anticipation" is also operative in familial pancreatic cancer, meaning that affected children die approximately 10 years earlier than their affected parents.