Norman Swan

Christine Jenkins is Professor of Respiratory Medicine at the University of New South Wales.

On ABC Radio National, you're with a health report.

Well, it's a story about childhood cancer.

It's actually quite technical, but it's important.

And it's important for consumers to know about it, both adults and parents, because it could well be relevant for adults, too, who develop cancer.

And I just need to explain a little bit here.

And you can give me marks according to how right I am in my description.

To really understand this story, you've got to understand something about your genes and your genome, the genome being the sum total of the genes in each of your cells.

So we're born with a set of genes, half of which come from our mummy and half of which come from our daddy, the sperm and the egg.

They come together and that's called your germline.

These are your inherited genes.

And what happens during life is that some genes mutate.

And these are called, just the technical term, are somatic mutations.

So on top of your germline DNA or your germline genes, you've got changes on top called somatic changes.

Now, when you've got a child with cancer, they often go hunting for

for these mutations that have happened to the child and causing cancer.

And one of the reasons they do that is to try and find out whether or not there are unusual mutations which might guide the treatment, but they don't go hunting and fishing across the whole genome, across the germline.

Anyway, this study, which is a massive study involving a lot of different authors,

looked at what happens if you were to do germline testing.

In other words, look at the whole genome in children with cancer.