These latest findings have helped form the rules of prediction to provide tools for clinicians, physicians, and patients in determining their hereditary risk and to provide the possibility of useful preventative evaluations and applications.
The prediction models incorporate both personal and family medical history factors. The possibility that risk predictions based on screening individuals by using these methods may be helpful in the future is hopeful. However, the importance of which specific characteristics currently being studied are not yet clearly understood.
So far, these rules have been based on a White population. Therefore the researchers suggest that future studies may be better understood when applied to specific ethnic minority populations.
According to the National Cancer Institute, 150,000 new cases of colon and rectal cancers will be diagnosed in 2006, with more than 55,000 deaths being attributed to the same.
