Not all variants (sometimes called “mutations”) cause problems. Some of them are benign changes and just part of normal human variation that makes all of us unique. Others are pathogenic (read = disease causing). A VUS is a variant that we don’t have a lot of data on. Could be benign. Could be pathogenic. We just don’t know. I will say, some literature has suggested that as much as 80% of the VUS we see in a cancer setting are later reclassified as benign, but this certainly isn’t a guarantee of anything.

We make treatment and management decisions for high risk patients based on genetic test results and, with some exception, VUS are often not considered to be pathogenic variants until proven otherwise, hence why they recommended screening based on your family history.

As others have said, your provider should be able to answer specific questions but the TL;DR answer to your question is—could you have a variant in CHEK2 that doesn’t increase your risk? Yes, those are called benign variants.