BRCA1 and BRCA2: The More We Know About Risk, the Less We Know

Knowing their degree of risk for breast cancer can help BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers make decisions about future surveillance. In the Women’s Environmental Cancer and Radiation Epidemiology (WECARE) study, researchers genotyped 700 women with asynchronous contralateral breast cancer (cases) and 1400 women with unilateral breast cancer (controls; matched for age, race, year of diagnosis, and registry). Next, they evaluated lifetime risk for breast cancer in first-degree relatives of cases and controls identified as BRCA1 or BRCA2 carriers. Analyses to examine risk variation among relatives of carriers were adjusted for factors such as age at diagnosis and specific genetic location of mutations.

A total of 470 unique sequence variants of …