(Reuters Health) – Women carrying BRCA mutations tied to breast and ovarian cancer may hit menopause a few years earlier than other women, according to a new study.
Doctors already discuss with those women whether they want immediate surgery to remove their ovaries and breasts, or if they want to start a family first and hold off on ovary removal.
“Now they have an additional issue to deal with,” said Dr. Mitchell Rosen, who worked on the new study at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center.
An estimated one in 600 U.S. women carries the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation.
Those mutations greatly increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancer. According to the National Cancer Institute, a woman’s chance of getting breast cancer at some point in her life increases from 12 to 60 percent with a BRCA mutation, and ovarian cancer from 1.4 percent to between 15 and 40 percent. Read full article.
