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BRCA and what it means for your cancer risk by lisa pierce flores
B
y the time Christie Jones of Fairfield was in her mid-30s, she’d already had a benign lump removed from her breast. By the time she was in her early 40s, she’d had so many anomalies during her annual breast exams that her doctor began asking about her family’s history of breast and ovarian cancer. There is none, she told her doctor with confidence, at least not on her mother’s side. But the questions kept coming. Q: What about her father’s side? Were her father’s siblings still living? If not, what had they died of? A: None of her father’s four siblings were still living, she realized, and all of them had died at relatively young ages of cancers (prostate, Did pancreatic) that her doctor informed her are you associated with genetic risk for breast cancer. know? Common ancestry makes Ashkenazi Jews more likely Q: What was her father’s ethnic background? to carry the types of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations that A: Ashkenazi Jew. can lead to BRCA-spectrum cancers — as much as five Q: What had his mother died of? times the occurrence of these gene mutations than is found A: Breast cancer. in the general population. However, these mutations still are By now Jones was beginning to worry. It was time, her carried by a small percentage of Ashkenazi Jews and testing doctor said, to consider getting tested for mutations in the for BRCA mutations isn’t recommended simply because a perBRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that can indicate a higher risk for son is of this heritage; they must also show other risk factors. breast and ovarian cancer. THE STATISTICS Over the course of her lifetime, the average American woman has a 12.4 percent chance of developing breast cancer, with her risk increasing after age 65, according to the National Cancer Institute. Women with mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes — genes that help to regulate cell
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growth — are at higher risk for breast and ovarian cancer, are more likely to contract these illnesses at a younger age, and more likely to suffer from the most aggressive variants of breast cancer, says breast surgeon Dr. Sunny Mitchell, a clinical instructor of surgery at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City.