Surviving Breast Cancer Runs in Your Family Too!!
We are all probably “tired” of hearing that getting cancer is inherited – that something in our genes predisposes us to increased risk of having cancer.
Now, surviving cancer - breast cancer in particular - is being placed in that very same light: it runs in your family, it is in your genes.
Such were the findings of Mikael Hartman from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden who led an international team that identified 2,787 mother-daughter pairs and 831 sister pairs among women with breast cancer diagnosed between 1961 and 2001 from Sweden’s national Multi-Generation Register.
The said investigation found that a woman’s breast cancer prognosis predicts the survival of her first-degree relatives with breast cancer:
- Mothers surviving breast cancer after five years, had daughters with a 91 percent chance of surviving the disease.
- But only 87 percent of daughters whose mothers had died within five years survived.
- Being sister to a woman who had died of breast cancer within five years gave a 70 percent chance of survival from breast cancer, whereas chances improved to 88 percent if she had survived.
- Overall, a poor prognosis for a woman gave first-degree relatives a 60-80 percent higher chance of breast cancer mortality within the five-year timeframe.
According to Dr Hartman, these findings are “relevant to women with newly diagnosed breast cancer” and to those treating them….the next step will be to understand what is inherited; tumor biology, response to therapy or vigilance of the immune system.
Findings have been published in the online journal Breast Cancer Research.
Find more details from the full report.
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