Welcome to the website of the Familial Cancer Database (www.facd.info)  

Cancer is associated with a wide range of hereditary disorders. Recognizing these disorders in cancer patients is important for the medical management of both patients and their relatives. Conversely, recognizing the fact that cancer may develop as a complication of a particular hereditary disorder which has already been diagnosed, is important for the same reason.

The Familial Cancer Database (FaCD)

The goal of FaCD is to assist clinicians and genetic counselors in making a genetic differential diagnosis in cancer patients, as well as in becoming aware of the tumor spectrum associated with hereditary disorders that have already been diagnosed in their patients. FaCD is not an expert system, but a tool for experts. It is not a substitute for consulting an expert on the clinical genetics of cancer. 
The content of the database is written by the editor and, for particular files, expert co-authors. Experts who want to contribute to particular syndrome files are invited to contact the editor; these authors will be listed in the syndrome files they contributed to. We will actively approach colleagues with the request to help us with the editorial process. This is not just to try to share the workload but also for reasons of quality control as we all are likely to have have our 'blind spots' and personal preferences when distilling facts from the literature.
Content is updated on a regular basis. Each of the database files displays the date of the most recent textual changes. 
 

How does FaCD work?

The software tries to match tumor and non-tumor features observed in patients and their families with any of the close to 500 disorders presently contained in the database and provides a synopsis for each of these disorders, including links to OMIM and other relevant web sites. This synopsis focuses on phenotype and cancer risk estimates; it does not discuss surveillance and does not list low-penetrant mutations/variants. The following classes of disorders have been included in this database:

• Hereditary disorders certainly or possibly associated with increased cancer risk
• Familial clustering of particular types of cancer e.c.i.
• Known patterns of multiple primary tumors
• Common disorders and external risk factors associated with increased cancer risk (e.g. diabetes, alcohol) . These disorders have been added because they can present as familial cases and carry their own cancer risk.

A document with suggestions on how to search the database and interpret its results is available here as well as in the "Find Syndromes" screen under the "How to search for syndromes"-button. We advise users to read it. Please also check my paper on the NCBI Bookshelf website for this purpose. 

Target audience for FaCD

FaCD is intended for use by health professionals with at least basic knowledge of clinical cancer genetics, and to researchers who may want to study the database for scientific purposes.   

Organisation & Policy

FaCD has been developed at the Department of Genetics of the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), The Netherlands. It is a non-commercial project and is financially supported by the UMCG department of Genetics. This financing does not influence the editorial content. This website does not accept or host any advertisement. Links provided on this website have the sole purpose of providing additional information. 

Privacy policy
Numbers of visits to the web site pages and the IP addresses generating those hits will be counted, using a cookie, to determine the popularity of items within the website. Visitors IP addresses will not be distributed to other parties or collected for other purposes then to determine the website popularity. Information from the contact form will only be used to answer the questions asked in those forms and will be deleted afterwards.

(date last modified: August 5, 2015