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Τετάρτη 15 Μαΐου 2013

Angelina Jolie’s Double Mastectomy: What We Know About BRCA Mutations and Breast Cancer



Angelina Jolie leaves Lancaster House after attending the G8 Foreign Minsters' conference in London, on April 11, 2013.

She doesn’t have cancer yet, but like many women with breast cancer mutations, she had the radical surgery to lower her risk.
Describing her decision as “My Medical Choice,” the 37-year-old actress revealed in an op-ed in the New York Times that she carries the BRCA1 gene mutation, which gives her an 87% risk of developing breast cancer at some point in her life. The abnormal gene also increases her risk of getting ovarian cancer, a typically aggressive disease, by 50%. To counteract those odds, Jolie wrote that she decided to have both her breasts removed.
(MORE: Cover Story: How to Cure Cancer)
While radical, her decision to pre-empt any future cancer is a common one, and backed by studies. In 2010, Australian scientists found that women with the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations who chose to have preventive mastectomies did not develop breast cancer over the three-year follow-up. What’s more, since the genetic abnormalities increase the risk of ovarian cancer, women who had their ovaries and fallopian tubes removed also dramatically lowered their risk of developing ovarian or breast cancers. TIME’s story about the study explained:

περισσότερα ΕΔΩ : http://healthland.time.com

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