Professor helps develop model to quantify how surgeries reduce cancer risk

Elisa Long was 33 years old and new to the UCLA Anderson faculty when her research and her life grimly intersected. Specializing in medical decision making under uncertainty, she routinely studied how to weigh difficult decisions, often in the absence of complete information. Newly diagnosed with breast cancer — she would soon learn that she is also a BRCA1 mutation carrier — Long was confronted with a critical dilemma of her own: How long could she delay prophylactic surgery to remove healthy organs and still avoid further cancer and risk to her life?Up to 65 percent of women with BRCA1 gene mutations and 45 percent of women with BRCA2 mutations develop breast cancer by age 70, compared to 12 percent in the general population. Nearly half of breast cancers in BRCA mutation carriers occur before the age of 50. Two-thirds of women with BRCA1-related breast cancers develop triple-negative tumors, making them immune to the most effective cancer treatments. A BRCA1 mutation also raises the lifetime risk of ovarian cancer, a particularly deadly disease, to 39 percent from about 1.5 percent. For BRCA2 mutation carriers, the risk of ovarian cancer rises to between 11 and 17 percent.Knowing these risks, a mutation carrier faces hard choices. She can dramatically reduce her cancer risks with surgeries to remove breasts and/or ovaries and fallopian tubes before any disease appears. Complications from bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction surgeries are common. The gynecological su...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news