“I would like to know more about testing for hereditary cancer risk. My mother had breast cancer and my sister had ovarian cancer. I asked my primary doctor about genetic testing, but she said that I don’t need it; as long as I am healthy, I’m good. What should I do?” As a genetic counselor,…
(JTA)-— It’s been a busy couple of weeks for breast cancer. Of course, breast cancer is always busy, exerting its sneaky destruction through abnormal cell growth. But now it’s October and Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and the scary fact is everywhere again: One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer during her lifetime….
Rochelle Shoretz, whose own breast cancer diagnosis at age 28 led her to found the national cancer organization Sharsheret, died Sunday at her home in Teaneck, New Jersey. She was 42. The cause of death was complications from breast cancer. Shoretz founded Sharsheret in 2001, while undergoing chemotherapy. The organization provides health information and support…
Two years after her double mastectomy, actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie said she had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed to avoid the risk of ovarian cancer. The glamorous wife of actor Brad Pitt and the mother of six children said in an op-ed column in the New York Times on Tuesday that she had…
A new initiative offering subsidized screening for cancer-causing mutations in Ashkenazi Jews — including those with no family history of cancer — appears to be splitting cancer specialists. The BRCA community study, sponsored by the Program for Jewish Genetic Health, began accepting applicants in January from Ashkenazi women and men age 25 and older. Led…
Alan Blassberg can’t enter a Cheesecake Factory restaurant without thinking about breast cancer. That’s where he was lunching when he got the call that his sister Sammy Blassberg had been diagnosed. The call would turn Blassberg from documentary filmmaker to activist. Sammy Blassberg died in 2010, at age 47. That same year, Blassberg’s other sister…
No family history of cancer? Get tested anyway suggests a recently-published study, but medical experts are deeply divided. The study indicates that even Ashkenazi women with no family history of the disease but who test positive for a cancer-causing genetic mutation have high rates of breast and ovarian cancer. At the heart of the dispute…
All women of Ashkenazi descent should be screened from age 30 for the BRCA gene mutation that causes breast cancer, an Israeli study recommends. The study, by a research team headed by Ephrat Levy-Lahad of Shaare Zedek Medical Center, was published Friday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United…
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