Angelina Jolie's Stunning Announcement

~ Laura

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Angelina Jolie reveals in an op-ed for the Times that she had a double mastecomy.

Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live. The cost of testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2, at more than $3,000 in the United States, remains an obstacle for many women.

I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options.

Published by Laura

5 thoughts on “Angelina Jolie's Stunning Announcement”

  1. I’ve been reading the science on the variant off an on for a while now. I think Jolie talking publicly is going to be a big deal in awareness. The CDC description of the BRCA1/2 variant is a good one, and it raises one important factor — much of the data on risk is based on families with both the gene variant & a history of breast cancer (which Jolie had). The meaning of the risk variant w/ no family history of breast cancer isn’t as well studied. So, in practice, if you are like Jolie and have a first degree relative who had breast cancer (better if you know if they also have the gene variant) and have the gene variant yourself, you are probably a good candidate for considering prophylactic surgery (the 2004 article I stumble don says 2/105 women who had prophylactic surgery v 184/378 of those who didn’t, which are pretty big numbers).

    One of the recommendations is that the BRCA1/2 test is valuable for a family if a patient is diagnosed with breast cancer — one of my daughter’s female relatives had the test, with the idea that if she had the gene variant, her female relatives could have the test, too.

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    1. My sister is … not me. She may have had genetic testing post-BC diagnosis, but if she did, she didn’t listen to anything about a BCRA gene. So before I ask her (and stress her out), do you know if the BCRA gene is linked to estrogen-fueled cancers? Or are they two totally separate things?

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  3. Also, an interesting political/legal tidbit: the BRCA1/2 gene is the is at issue in the gene patent case that was argued last month before the supreme court: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/15/science/la-sci-sn-gene-patent-supreme-court-myriad-genetics-20130415
    Myriad/University of Utah own the patent to the BRCA1/2 genes, so any test looking for the gene must be licensed from Myriad, and, thus, is a monopoly that results in the high cost of the test.

    http://www.pubpat.org/brca.htm, for a advocate’s explanation arguing against the gene patent. The case has an interesting legal history.

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