Word: breast
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...everyone. And it takes a healthy dose of courage to make the decision. But a new and highly regarded study published on Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that women with a high risk of breast cancer can reduce the risk of getting the disease by 90 percent by having both breasts surgically removed before the disease appears. While the study is good news, says TIME health reporter Janice Horowitz, "it places high-risk but healthy women in a horrible dilemma...
Still more concerns, legal or otherwise, could arise with the increasing availability of tests for so-called low-penetrance genes, such as those associated with breast or colon cancer. These don't necessarily mean that the carrier will be stricken but suggest an increased risk, especially in the presence of certain "co-factors" like poor diet, alcohol or smoking. Such tests are already available for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 breast-cancer genes but at a cost of about $2,700 each, and with their limited predictive abilities, only a few are performed. Still, they raise critical questions for any woman...
...dark side of genetic testing is that information affecting your future health is as valuable to insurers as it is to doctors, but for very different--and disturbing--reasons. Knowing that you are susceptible to breast cancer or diabetes would be invaluable to an HMO looking for ways to screen out riskier candidates and thus keep costs down--and profits...
Whereas traditional drug companies focus on developing chemical compounds, the biotech industry prefers to use biological ones--hormones, proteins and other substances that either already exist in the body or can be created from scratch. Examples include interferon, the clot buster tPA and the new breast-cancer drug Herceptin...
While society is torn between benefits and risks, commercial scientists have done a bad job of regulating themselves, in Magnus' view. "Testing with breast-cancer genes was offered far too early," he says. "It wasn't even clear what the tests meant." He adds, "We could literally have had women getting double mastectomies because of a positive result on a genetic test, where in fact the test does not mean that they are at increased risk...