Alison's Story--A Cautionary Tale in the Age of Genomic Medicine

Alison's story illustrates the disastrous consequences of not securing an accurate family history when evaluating a patient for solid tumor malignancy; this is even more acute when the patient is diagnosed at a young age or has other close relatives affected by the disease. Rapidly advancing genomic technologies directly challenge traditional management practices of referring all patients who may require genetic testing to a genetic counselor or clinical genetics service because next-generation targeted molecular therapies may be indicated based on genomic DNA analysis and may be required urgently to treat life-threatening advanced disease, at times, before genetic counseling.