Bowel Doctor: A gene test told Lynne she risked bowel cancer. So she took a drastic decision...

Most of us have found ourselves lying awake at night worrying about cancer, imagining what we’d do if that back pain or headache was something more sinister.

But what if cancer was not a possibility, but practically a certainty?

That’s the fear Lynne Fisher faced after she discovered she inherited a genetic fault that gave her an 80 per cent chance of bowel cancer.

Celebrities such as Sharon Osbourne and pop star Michelle Heaton are among those who have been found to have the so-called ‘breast cancer genes’ — the faulty BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes — which put them at raised risk of breast and ovarian cancer (these are also linked to prostate cancer).

But less well known is that there’s a gene for bowel cancer, a disease that affects 40,000 people in Britain every year and kills 16,000.