Three years after finding out that I’m BRCA-positive—I carry the gene mutation linked to breast and ovarian cancer—I’ve developed an eagle eye for BRCA news. So imagine my surprise when I opened the New York Post the other morning and read that women who have ovarian cancer and carry the BRCA-1 or BRCA-2 gene mutations live longer than those who get the disease but don’t have one of the mutations.
Huh? I was so confused that I passed the paper across the dining room table so that my husband could read it too.
In a study, published this month in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, researchers at the Chaim Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, in Israel, found that Ashkenazi Jewish women who have one of the BRCA mutations and have ovarian cancer were 28% less likely to die from the disease over a follow-up period of nine years than those without the mutation. The mutations that make a woman more likely to develop ovarian or breast cancer may help her body respond better to chemotherapy when ovarian cancer does occur.
Did this call into question my decision, just three months before, to have my ovaries and tubes removed?
No. This news concerns women like my aunt, who happens to be BRCA-positive and is a breast- and ovarian-cancer survivor. Discoveries like this constitute a bright spot after so much bad news.
My aunt didn’t know she was BRCA-positive before she got ovarian cancer, but her disease prompted both me and my mom to get genetic testing, and it turned out we were both positive. My mom, a breast cancer survivor, had her ovaries and tubes removed in 2005 and I followed two years later.
The future of cancer becomes a bit brighter each time another complexity is decoded. The hope is that one day doctors will tailor treatment to the genes of each patient. Prophylactic surgery like mine may become a thing of the past.
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