Germline testing study’s implications for veteran access to prostate cancer treatments

In this video, Daniel Kwon, MD, discusses implications from the JNCI Cancer Spectrum paper, “Germline testing for veterans with advanced prostate cancer: concerns about service-connected benefits.” Kwon is an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Transcription:

The finding that veterans with service-connected disability benefits were hesitant to undergo germline testing due to fear of benefit loss is significant. Could you discuss the implications of this finding for veterans' access to potentially life-saving treatments?

Well, they may be missing out on potentially life-saving treatments, and their family might also be missing out on some benefits as well. To get into that, germline testing is part of precision oncology, which has been revolutionary in the field of prostate cancers and other cancers as well, like bladder cancer. And so there have been a number of large phase 3 studies that have shown that PARP inhibitors are effective, with increased survival, improved quality of life in men with castrate-resistant prostate cancer and those who have DNA damage repair mutations, whether it's germline or somatic mutations, and particularly benefiting BRCA2 and BRCA1 alterations and a few others.And so a veteran might have 1 of these or harbor 1 of these mutations, but because they're not doing germline testing, might be missing out on something that they could benefit from. Not only that, but there are implications personally for their risk of other types of cancers, and also similar implications for their family members, and so if the veteran were to test positive, they might have children or other living blood relatives who might also be positive and never find out, and they might never be able to potentially find cancer early or prevent cancer altogether by having this cancer risk information for them.

This transcription was AI generated and edited by human editors for clarity.