An audit of families with unreported or misreported cancers verified through a population-based cancer registry: implications for providing cancer risk assessment and management advice by a Familial Cancer Centre

Background The Cancer Council Victoria manages a populationbased cancer registry, the Victorian Cancer Registry (VCR). All cancer diagnoses in the state of Victoria are notified to this register. As part of the genetic cancer risk assessment process, the Victorian Familial Cancer Centres (FCCs) submit the family history pedigree to the Cancer Council for verification. Each person in the pedigree is checked against the Register. Cancer verification and pathology reports are returned to the FCCs within five days of the submitted request. Since 2002 over eight thousand families have been submitted to the Cancer Council for verification with over 160,000 individuals checked for cancer. 3% of all individuals with no report of cancer had a cancer confirmed, and 4% had a different diagnosis confirmed to what was reported.