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Genetic Testing for Cancer Risk Not Clinically Useful
from ScienceNOW Daily News
For women, genetic screening offers the hope of better understanding the likelihood that they'll develop breast cancer. But reality doesn't match that dream, at least not yet. Scientists at the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) Wednesday reported that DNA doesn't predict breast cancer risk much better than a questionnaire. The small improvement does not yet justify the cost of introducing the technique into the clinic, they say.
In recent years, several gene mutations have been discovered that increase a woman's risk of breast cancer. ...In theory, testing for these genes could allow women to make more informed choices about how often to undergo routine mammograms, for example, or, more radically, whether to take anticancer drugs like tamoxifen prophylactically.
These decisions are currently made by patients, in consultation with clinicians, based on a predicted risk of cancer provided by the so-called Gail model. This model calculates a risk based on the answers to seven questions, including the age at which a woman began menstruating, the age at which she had her first child, and the number of relatives with breast cancer.
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