Description: Survival traits for certain kinds of cancers are passed from parents to children, concludes a Swedish study reported in the November issue of The Lancet Oncology journal.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm analyzed a Swedish family database that included three million families and more than 1 million cancer patients. The scientists found that children whose parents had good survival rates after being diagnosed with breast, lung, prostate or colorectal cancer had better survival rates for those same cancers than people whose parents died within 10 years of being diagnosed with those cancers.

The increased risk of death for children whose parents had died earlier was 75 percent for breast cancer, 107 percent for prostate cancer, 44 percent for colorectal cancer, and 39 percent for lung cancer.

"In conclusion, our findings provide support for the hypothesis that cancer-specific survival of a patient can be predicted from previous parental survival from cancer at