How much of skin cancer is about genetics?
Patients often ask whether they are likely to have skin cancer if their mother or father had this problem. Being a genetic combination of your parents, what you do inherent is the same skin types. People of African descent, Northern European descent, and Asian descent have different skin types. There are different susceptibilities to skin cancer and sun exposure for these reasons, but that is about the only direct connection between your parents and you as far as skin cancer risk.
There are very rare exceptions where certain gene sequences predispose them to the development of tumors. These patients however are extremely rare, and most of these patients would likely have had numerous skin cancers at a very young age and would be well aware of the genetic nature of the problem. In the vast majority of cases, non-melanoma skin cancers don’t develop until a person’s 50s and that’s typically more of a product of decades of accumulated sun damage on fair skin.
