Ovarian Cancer: Understanding the Different Categories of Genetic Testing- What You Got From Your Parents & What’s Changed Since You Were Born

“Both of these categories are personalized medicine,” says Sheryl Walker, a cancer genetic counselor at Genome Medical in Dallas, Texas.

Hereditary genetic testing, Walker explains, looks for genetic mutations that are present in the whole body in order to better inform women of their own risks as well as the cancer risks that their family members may also have.

“It doesn’t matter if we looked at a skin cell, a breast cell, a colon cell,” she says. “We would find that mutation, that hereditary mutation that’s been passed generally from a parent to a child.”

The other category of genetic testing is called “somatic” genetic testing. It looks at the gene mutations present in the ovarian cancer tumor itself. These are the mutations — which oncologists call “driver mutations” — that can help to better inform a woman of her best available treatment options.

“And that makes sense,” Walker says. “Because we don’t want to just say, all right, we’re going to just throw this chemotherapy at every single ovarian cancer patient and hope that it works for everyone, because every person is different. Every cancer is different. Every tumor is different.”

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