Multiple endocrine neoplasia

Abstract

Cancer is a genetic disease. Neoplastic transformation is characterized by a stepwise accumulation of genetic damage within a cell that results in the acquisition of increasingly more aggressive and uncontrolled growth properties. Most sporadic cancers result from the chance occurrence of multiple somatic mutations within an individual cell. Patients with one of the rare familial cancer syndromes have a predisposition to tumor development that is conferred by the inheritance of a cancer-associated mutation in the germline DNA. © 2008 Springer New York.