Caregivers and Family

After losing a spouse, it’s normal to feel alienated and alone. A social worker, writer and cancer widow offers her tips for healing. Kristin Meehof, a cancer widow, offers 7 ways to maintain your sanity and begin the healing process.

Whether you are facing a medical crisis or someone you know and love just heard life-changing news, chances are you’re in a place -- both literally and figuratively -- that you never imagined. When the worst occurs, perspective can be everything. How shifting their focus after a cancer diagnosis helped one couple cope.

Many factors can increase the risk of developing melanoma and other skin cancers. Some of these factors are due to behaviors, like exposure to the sun. However, some risk factors for skin cancers are inherited in families.

As advances in next generation sequencing technology becomes increasingly important in treating adult cancers, the same advances are equally important in managing treatment for pediatric cancer patients. For example, recent work by researchers at the University of Michigan on the Peds-MiOncoSeq study found that identifying mutations present in tumor tissue can lead to changes in treatment recommendations.

If you recently received a cancer diagnosis, you will likely be experiencing a variety of emotions. Chances are you are thinking about how the diagnosis will impact your life and when and how to tell your friends and family. Experts agree there is no right way or time to tell people of your diagnosis -- it is an individual choice.

There is no question that breast cancer disproportionately affects women, but we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the risk to men. As we continue to learn more about the ways our genes influence our cancer risk, involvement of male relatives in genetic counseling and genetic testing can provide important information for your family's breast cancer risk evaluation.

The PROMPT Registry (Prospective Registry of Multiplex Testing) is collaborative registry project that will begin the process of collecting data for patients with mutations in genes that are currently less well described and understood.

Everyone is at risk for colon cancer, but that risk is not the same for everyone. Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer affecting men and women and each year, there are about 93,000 new cases of colon cancer and 39,610 new cases of rectal cancer diagnosed in the United States. The average person has a 5 percent chance of developing colon cancer, but some people are at a higher risk.

Elena Stoffel, M.D., director of cancer genetics at the U-M Rogel Cancer Center answers questions about colon cancer and genetic risk.

Kevin Myers was born with a genetic predisposition to colon cancer. His condition, Familial Adenomatous Polyposis or FAP, is one of a number of inherited colon cancer syndromes, including Lynch Syndrome and MYH-associated polyposis (MAP).