When Karyn Paringatai learned about a pattern among her family members, it changed the course of her life: A lot of people died young.
As Karyn dug into her family history, she learned many Māori families, like her own, suffered from a rare form of stomach cancer called diffuse gastric cancer.
Sarah Zhang recently wrote a story on this kind of cancer as a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Today, she gets into all the details with Short Wave host Emily Kwong: the mutation that causes it and the life-changing decision people with the mutation have to make – risk dying or get surgery to remove their entire stomach?
Interested in more science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.
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This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was Kwesi Lee.
