Word: breast
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...first Fisher would not even consider it. "I always lived in fear of getting breast cancer because most of the women in my family got it," she said. "But I was too busy trying to survive ovarian cancer to think about breast cancer." Too busy until she read about the work of Mary-Claire King, the University of California, Berkeley, geneticist who is searching for the gene that causes the inherited form of breast cancer and also increases the risk of ovarian cancer...
After joining King's study group, Fisher learned that she carried the telltale pattern of markers. The agonizing question: What should she do? Huge numbers of women will eventually face the same dilemma. The inherited form of breast cancer accounts for 5% to 10% of cases, says King, meaning that "there might be half a million women who either already have or will develop the disease because of this gene." Carriers have an 85% chance of getting breast cancer...
...simple answers about what to do. Should women with the gene have mastectomies quickly or should they have frequent mammograms to detect cancer early? Neither choice is foolproof, and no studies of survival rates have been completed. "The literature is full of anecdotal reports of women who had breast cancer even after prophylactic surgery," says King. "If a woman has a mastectomy, she is doing it based on common sense and logic, not on statistical proof...
Fisher's common sense told her that her breasts posed too great a risk, and she had them removed the week before Thanksgiving. "I did the best that I could to prevent breast cancer," she says. "I hope it will be enough...
...have located the genes for Huntington's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, the so-called bubble-boy disease, the disease featured in the film Lorenzo's Oil, a major form of ataxia, and a common kind of colon cancer, among others. Scientists expect to zero in on the first breast-cancer gene any week...