Source: http://ift.tt/eKERsB - Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Tuesday morning actress and sex symbol Angelina Jolie announced that she had both of her ovaries removed in a preventative surgery to reduce her risk for ovarian cancer after some signals of precancer turned up on a routine scan. She had a previous surgery in 2013 to remove her breasts because she has a mutation in a gene called BRCA1 which increases the risk of breast and ovarian cancers. "I did not do this solely because I carry the BRCA1 gene mutation," Jolie clarified, in her New York Times essay about removing her ovaries. But that was a major part of her decision. What's the risk? Mutations in the BRCA genes (there are two, named 1 and 2 respectively) increase a person's risk for cancers, including breast and ovarian. Only about 0.25% of the general population has mutations in one of these genes. While this is only a small amount of the population, someone who carries a mutation in one of these genes is much more likely than the average person to get cancer. A New England Journal of Medicine study indicates that having a mutated BRCA gene increases your lifetime risk of breast cancer to between 60% and 85%, and a lifetime risk of ovarian cancer between 15% and 40% , depending on the gene and the mutation. The mutation is present in about 2% of female breast cancer cases and 10 to 15% of ovarian cancer cases. Men with BRCA mutations are also at an increased risk for cancer, including male breast, pancreatic, and prostate can
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