Summer's Complaint: My family's courageous, century-long struggle with a rare genetic cancer syndrome | oneFAPvoice

welcome to oneFAPvoice

- a positively charged Familial Adenomatous Polyposis community.
  • join today!

Summer’s Complaint: My family’s courageous, century-long struggle with a rare genetic cancer syndrome


Familial Adenomatous Polyposis, or FAP, accounts for roughly 1 percent of hereditary colorectal cancer and carries an extremely high lifetime risk of colon cancer and elevated risks for other exceedingly rare cancers. It is an autosomal dominant condition caused by germline mutations in the adenomatous polyposis coli (APC) gene. By the age of fifty, nearly 99 percent of untreated FAP patients will have developed cancer.

This is the dark shadow that has lingered over one family since at least 1911, when a matriarch was first seen at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota for symptoms that would become commonplace in her descendants. Three of her five children died in their thirties with what they’d come to call “summer’s complaint.” Her granddaughter, genetically programmed by a defect on her 5th chromosome also developed cancer, which would ultimately take her life.

expertly curated content related to this topic

To improve your experience on this site, we use cookies. This includes cookies essential for the basic functioning of our website, cookies for analytics purposes, and cookies enabling us to personalize site content. By clicking on 'Accept' or any content on this site, you agree that cookies can be placed. You may adjust your browser's cookie settings to suit your preferences.
More information

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.

Close