Anne McGinnis Breen's Brain Tumor Blog: Genetic links to meningioma
MY dear Meningimates,
I'm sharing links to information I wanted to find for my own health and future wellness for me, my siblings and especially my three kids and grandson. I hope I can also help educate you and perhaps we can alert more of our doctors too.
I'm hoping these long reports below are not too much information for some at the time of medical treatment crisis. I really do not want to overwhelm anyone about potential genetic risks for our family members either.
Surfing around I found these four inherited diseases related to meningioma development. You can take these reports to your own medical team and share them with your family members if you want, or just save them for when you or your loved ones have time to read more.
From your own emails, it doesn't seem to me that very many of our doctors share this type of genetic neurofibromatosis background info with you people who might also like to keep your eyes open for symptoms in your own relatives, At the DIA conference last fall I met several young parents of little kids with neurofibromatosis NF2 and they didn't seem to know it strikes older adults like us too That apparent medical knowledge gap in the parents made me even more curious about genetic links to meningioma.
http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=10259
This European article above says relatives of people with meningiomas are three times more likely to develop this disease than other people, Lifestyle choices and specific environmental factors besides prior radiation exposure seem to add to some individuals inherited disease risk.
I'd like to propose my own theory that prior exposure to radiation or cancer in either parent or grandparent before they have their own children might contribute to an inherited genetic cancer susceptability from DNA mutations caused by a parent's exposure, especially of nurses and ER staff during pregnancy. These genetic mutations could increase total cummulative lifetime radiation risk and explain the cancer mutations in my 3 siblings. However, neither of my parents and none of my own 5 siblings have had meningioma, but all of my sisters and my Mom have had uterine fibroids.
So far only a small proportion of meningiomas are directly linked to inherited genetic diseases and some longterm late effects of previous ionizing medical radiation exposure. These four inherited diseases can cause a wide range of low grade abnormal cell growth masses, benign lumps and bumps, cysts, adenomas, lesions, neoplasms and solid tumors or meningiomas before they progress to cancer. The first one is von Rechlinghausen disease or Neurofibromatosis Type One and Two, NF1 and NF2, and three other genetic mutations linked to meningiomas are called Cowden syndrome, Werner syndrome and Gorlin syndrome.
I added four reliable medical links below to read more about the potential disease progression of each one..
Studying about our genetic history is like studying our family history and the extra reading is good cognitive therapy too. lol
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/neurofibromatosis/neurofibromatosis.htm
http://www.cancer.net/patient/Cancer+Types/Cowden+Syndrome
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1114125-clinical#a0217
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0002423/
GBYAY Anne McGinnis Breen
