BETA - Is acute myeloid leukemia hereditary?

I think only in these rare circumstances where people have a genetic predisposition that is inherited. By and large, the vast majority of cases are not inherited. And we're going to talk a lot about gene mutations and chromosome abnormalities in this disease. But these abnormalities, generally speaking, only affect the leukemic cells themselves, the abnormal blood cells. So they're not passed on, they're not inherited, and so we generally do not think of this as an inherited disorder. The reality is that it's extremely rare for AML to run in families, but the more we know, the more we know. So there's ways of understanding a person's personal history and personal family history that should give us signals to look a little further. There's also certain genes that we usually see acquired or picked up. Those are called somatic genes. Those are the ones we more often see in acute myeloid leukemia, but those genes that are picked up can sometimes give us hints that someone might have been born with a predisposition. So any patient who has a very strong family history of blood cancers or has a particular gene that we might want to look into a little bit further, we will involve our genetics team to try to figure out if there is a familial inheritance pattern or a familial predisposition. Again, it's exceedingly rare, and even people who have a familial predisposition, most of them will not develop an acute myeloid leukemia. We might have different implications for how a person should be monitored over time if we know that there might be an inherited predisposition. So there's a lot of people around the country and the world who are trying to describe and find the families because every familial leukemia is a bit unique in and of itself. So we're learning more, and I take every patient that I meet, and I want to make sure if there's any hint of a familial pattern that we can find it. I do try to reassure patients that it's not very common, but we always want to look into it. As part of the workup for AML and all the tests that we do, we perform genetic testing to look for any gene that we feel could be contributing to the production of these abnormal cells that are being made. And a part of that is we see some genes that we know carry a higher risk of being something passed down. If we see those genes, or if we know that you have a family history of blood cancer or solid tumor cancer, or if you're a younger patient diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, those things altogether will kind of light up in front of us knowing that we need to get you to a genetic counselor so that you can have what we call fibroblast testing, where they just take a small skin biopsy and they look for these things in your skin, and that would be a better test to see if there's what we call a predisposition syndrome to acute myeloid leukemia being passed down in your bloodline. We also know that there are what we call germline, or family dispositions in some rarer cases where the mutations that one can have in AML are kind of deep-seated in someone's DNA and they're passed down. But those are a little rarer regarding AML.