A Plain Surprise! Risk of Colorectal Cancer with No Family History

My name is Brian Plain. I am a 45-year-old father of two beautiful young girls, and I'm very lucky to be married to my wonderful wife, Karen, who works at GenomicMD as the Director of Operations. In my previous career, I was a high-net-worth supervisory principal who helped investors mitigate risk through long-term planning. Now, I help insure and mitigate risks for high-net-worth individuals and their families at the Gaudette Insurance Agency in Southborough, Massachusetts. 

Karen has always worked in the genetics field, but when she started at GenomicMD and talked about the Lifetime Genomics Risk Assessment (LGRA) and how polygenic risk scores work, I was intrigued. I like math and science, and obviously, from my career choices, I’m interested in mitigating risks. So, I was interested to see where my own risks were.

A few weeks later, Karen sat me down and showed me her test results, which weren’t concerning, and then started explaining how the test could tell your risk for disease relative to the population, even up to greater than four times the population risk. She had spent a long time describing this. I cut her off and said, "You're preparing me for something, aren’t you?” She nodded and pulled my report up next. I found I was at high risk for colorectal cancer. When she showed me the last page of the report, I found out that not only was my colorectal cancer risk high, but it was off the charts…the more than four times the population risk (the 100th percentile) she was talking about earlier….that was me. I was completely shocked.

Immediately, I called my primary care doctor and explained what I had just learned. She advised me to schedule a colonoscopy right away since I was just weeks away from turning 45 at the time. I just had the procedure done a few weeks ago. I'm so relieved to have found out this information, and I took action early because they found three precancerous polyps. I go back again in three years instead of the standard five, and we’ve shared all of this with my sisters in hopes that they will take the test, too. My youngest sister recently lost her husband to leukemia, so her own health and longevity are especially important to her and her little girls.

I'm truly grateful for my wife and everyone at GenomicMD and this science's existence. If she had never worked there, I doubt I would have found this amazing test or been this proactive with my health. The information provided to me was so valuable, and it showed me that I need to take more steps in managing my health, even though I like to think I’m a pretty healthy guy. Health risks cannot be avoided; they are part of life, but we can be aware of and manage them. The GenomicMD Lifetime Genomic Risk Assessment is a great way to take that first step.