Mutation Carrier Status and

Shaheen et al. (1) recently reported that carriers of hemochromatosis (HFE) gene mutations have a statistically sig-nificantly increased risk of colon cancer. Taken together with other recent find-ings (2), these results suggest that het-erozygosity for hemochromatosis con-fers increased risk of both colon cancer and cardiovascular disease in the ap-proximately 15 % of the U.S. population who are HFE gene mutation carriers. However, Shaheen et al. (1) may have underestimated the strength of the association between colon cancer risk and HFE gene mutations because of th