Being concerned for your child is completely understandable when they walk out the door but there are some things that even a parent cannot control. Recently, a women wondered if her 18 year old daughter should get a breast cancer gene test. Her concerns are valid considering she lost two aunts to breast cancer, one before menopause and the other shortly after. I found the doctors answer to be interesting so I wanted to share it with the readers of DailyVenusDiva.com.
Breast cancer is caused by a combination of many environmental and genetic factors. We don’t yet know most of the genetic changes, or mutations, which cause it. However, we can test for two of them. These BRCA * short for breast cancer * mutations are inherited in an autosomal dominant pattern, which means that if men or women have inherited the mutation, there’s a 50% chance of passing the genetic change on to their sons or daughters. Not everyone who has inherited the BRCA-1 mutation will develop breast cancer, but the risk is greater than for the general population. BRCA-2 mutations also increase the risk for getting ovarian cancer. Breast cancer is rare in men, but if a man has the mutation, he’s just as likely as a woman to pass this vulnerability to half of his children, male and female.
If one of your aunts did carry the BRCA gene, your father had as high as a 50% chance of having inherited the same mutation from the same parent as his sister did. If so, you would have half of your father’s risk of having inherited the BRCA mutation. So the highest likelihood that your daughter has inherited this BRCA breast cancer vulnerability mutation would be 12.5%. Is that a big enough risk to merit DNA testing? Your daughter would have to decide that for herself after careful …
Daily Venus Diva -- Daily Venus Diva.
Join the Curvy Conversation