In the wake of Angelina Jolie’s stunning double mastectomy news, we wanted to speak with a genetic counselor to find out a little bit more about how Angelina Jolie — and so many other women — came to the decision to have a preventative double mastectomy done. Jolie came to the decision after finding out that she had a mutation in her BRCA1 gene, which greatly increases the likelihood of breast cancer in women. The two complicit genes — BRCA1 and BRCA2 were first discovered by researchers in the early 90s, who identified them as the root cause of a genetic predisposition to hereditary breast and ovarian cancers. According to researchers, hereditary cancer accounts for between 3 and 5 percent of all cases of breast and ovarian cancers, which sounds like a small number, but actually amounts to tens of thousands of cases a year.
To find out more about these genes, the tests that detect them, and the difficult decision Angelina Jolie and so many other women make to prevent breast cancer, we spoke with Gina Nuccio, a genetic counselor at Baptist Memorial Health Care, a hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Keep reading »
