© 2003 by Oxford University Press
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© 2003 Oxford University Press
NEWS |
Study Clarifies Risk of Breast, Ovarian Cancer Among Mutation Carriers
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Women who inherit mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes may have high lifetime risks for breast and ovarian cancer regardless of whether they have a family history of the cancers.
That finding comes from the New York Breast Cancer Study (NYBCS), the most thorough analysis to date of cancer risks among women who carry the mutations. Risk levels found in the NYBCS are similar to those reported in most earlier studies, typically done in families with several cancer cases over multiple generations. But other studies have come up with lower risk estimates, and some scientists questioned whether the preponderance of families with strong cancer histories—who provided invaluable clues early in BRCA1 and BRCA2 research—might have led to an overestimation of risk for other carriers. Might there be "low-risk" families that carry a mutation but are protected against cancer by some other genetic or environmental mechanism?
The answer may be