Close relatives of women who carry mutations in a BRCA gene do not have an increased risk of developing breast cancer if they themselves do not carry these mutations. These are the findings contained in the summary of a study being published online Oct. 31, 2011, in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. These results run counter to a previous study showing a higher risk for these women, and suggest they may not need extra cancer screening and other preventive measures.
"This new study gives reassurance to non-carriers that they do not have an increased risk due to the familial mutation, and should be regarded the same as other non-carriers with first-degree relatives who have had breast cancer," said study first author Allison Kurian, MD, assistant professor of medicine and health research and policy at Stanford University School of Medicine. "One strength of the current study is the control women it used as a yardstick for comparing the breast cancer incidence in non-carriers of family-specific mutations. The control women were also relatives of breast cancer patients, but of patients without mutations. This is a more appropriate yardstick than average risk in the general population, since close relatives of all breast cancer patients have somewhat higher than average risks."
Women who inherit a mutation in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene carry a 5- to 20-fold higher risk of developing breast or ovarian cancers. First-degree relatives who have not inherited the same familial BRCA mutation have been considered to have a considerably lower risk for breast cancer.
In 2007, a study of women who tested negative for a specific familial BRCA mutation showed they had a 2- to 5-fold increased risk of developing breast cancer; which could be considered comparable to the risk of having a BRCA mutation. According to Kurian, the results raised concerns that non-carriers might require similar screening and preventive measures as their mutation-carrying relatives, such as annual breast MRI and prophylactic surgery, and cast some doubt on the meaning of a negative BRCA test.
Kurian said that the studies had looked at women who were in cancer family clinics and compared their breast cancer risk to that of women in the general population. Women from cancer family clinics were more likely to have intensive screening, and breast cancer risks tend to be higher among close relatives of breast cancer patients than those in the general population.
The investigators took a different approach in this research by studying women with breast cancer in 3,047 families in three population-based cancer registries in Northern California (1,214), Australia (799) and Canada (1,034) through a consortium called the Breast Cancer Family Registry. They found 292 families in which a woman had a BRCA mutation. This is the largest analysis to date of breast cancer risk of non-carriers of family-specific BRCA mutations.
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The investigators also found that a small percentage of women - 3.4 percent of women in the general populations of Australia, Canada and the U.S. - who are at highest risk for unexplained reasons (reasons other than a BRCA mutation) account for approximately 32 percent of all breast cancer cases, reflecting the wide range of factors that could play a role in breast cancer development. Recent research suggests that many different genetic variants affect breast cancer risk, and that the women at highest risk have inherited many of these variants.
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Source-Eurekalert