ET Five members of family have stomachs removed By Philip Delves Broughton in New York

AN extreme form of preventive medicine has worked for five members of a Canadian family, who had their seemingly healthy stomachs removed to avoid a rare cancer.

Scientists are calling the treatment a triumph for genetic screening. After watching her twin sister, Nicola, become the latest member of her family to die from cancer, Natasha Benn, now 32, put herself in the hands of a team of scientists from Britain, Canada, the United States and Portugal.

They found that she had the same faulty gene, which caused her sister, mother, grandmother, great-aunt and great-grandfather to succumb to diffuse gastric cancer, a disease so virulent that it is generally only detected when it has become untreatable.

To save her from the same fate, doctors removed Ms Benn's stomach and part of her small intestine - where the cancer develops - and made a smaller, replacement stomach using a loop from the large intestine, which enables her to digest her food.

Ms Benn has lost weight and can only eat small meals, but as she told the New England Journal of Medicine: "I'm on a special diet for life, but I'm alive." Following the success of her operation, her older sister, who also has the faulty gene, followed suit, as did three other members of her family. All of them remain fit and healthy.

Dr David Huntsman, of the British Columbia Cancer Agency in Vancouver, a genetic pathologist who oversaw the Benns' treatment, said: "We all lost a lot of sleep before Natasha had her surgery because she was a young, healthy woman undergoing a major operation on the basis of our genetic testing results."

When they cut out her stomach, however, they found scores of tiny cancers, which he called a "time bomb" had they not been removed.

-- Anonymous, June 22, 2001