Is my family at risk for developing BPDCN?

Is my family at risk for developing BPDCN?

This definitely comes up. And I just had a large family in my office with, a family member who has BPDCN

And the question was, do we all need to get tested? Do our kids need to get tested? And the answer is no.

There really isn't a need to test family members. I think vigilance is important. So I think everyone, but particularly maybe family members who have a family, you know, member who has a malignancy of sort should be up on their screening, whether it's, you know, yearly blood counts, colonoscopy, you know, mammogram for women.

So those things are really essential to do. But there's no beyond that. No specific testing, either molecular bone marrow biopsies that need to be done on family members.

I would say that when you have these rare diseases, we don't have any screening to identify beforehand, but I think you ask a really great question.

One is, are we seeing families of patients with multiple, you know, members with BPDCN, maybe not BPDCN in particular yet, you know, as it's an emerging field, but you definitely see patients where there are multiple family members, blood related with blood cancers and blood disorders, including but not limited to acute myeloid leukemia, which BPDCN used to be part of that family.

So I think that's something we need to learn more about. So that would be more towards the genetic basis. And then too an unusual component of BPDCN. As I spend my life and career researching it, is that I'm seeing maybe 20 and maybe up to 30% of patients who occur BPDCN with another prior or concomitant hematologic malignancy. It's a very unusual finding in such a rare disease to then be paired with other, if you will, more common blood cancers.

And those blood cancers are serious ones as well CMML, MDS, MPN, AML, multiple myeloma, T-ALL, just to name a few. And we've published on this before.