Validation of the NCCN/Yale criteria for the identification of CDH1 pathogenic variant carriers

Background: Diffuse gastric and lobular breast cancer (LBC) syndrome is an autosomal-dominant syndrome characterised by early-onset diffuse gastric cancer and LBC most often caused by germline pathogenic variants (PVs) in CDH1. We previously showed the International Gastric Cancer Linkage Consortium (IGCLC) criteria for genetic testing to have poor sensitivity for CDH1 PV and proposed our own simpler and more sensitive Yale criteria. The European Reference Network on Genetic Tumour Risk Syndromes subsequently proposed expanding the IGCLC criteria and showed its LBC-expanded criteria to be more sensitive than the IGCLC criteria in a European cohort of CDH1 PV carriers.

Methods: We aggregated demographic and clinical data of all CDH1 PV carriers identified at three US commercial laboratories. These data were used to calculate the sensitivity of the IGCLC, LBC-expanded and National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN)/Yale criteria.

Results: Data on 708 probands and their 4318 family members were included in the analysis. In this cohort, the sensitivities for detecting CDH1 PVs were 23.6% for IGCLC criteria, 35.7% for LBC-expanded criteria and 82.2% for NCCN/Yale criteria.

Conclusion: In a large cohort of CDH1 PV carriers to date, the IGCLC and LBC-expanded criteria called for genetic testing in a minority of CDH1 PV carriers while the Yale criteria detected the large majority. Along with their superior sensitivity, the NCCN/Yale criteria address critical practical challenges in cancer genetics by not depending heavily on pathology information from family members which is often lacking and by incorporating recommendations from other cancer genetics guidelines.