I was surprised to learn that Angelina Jolie's double mastectomy was a preventative surgery based on a genetic screening. I, like many others, had assumed that the surgery was in reaction to finding a tumor or a result from a mammogram. My mother had to get a double mastectomy, but this was after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Unfortunately, her cancer had already metastasized throughout her body and would later emerge in her bone, brain, and liver tissues resulting in her death.
I found this paper by Meijers-Heijboer et al. (2001) in The New England Journal of Medicine that supported the efficacy of bilateral total mastectomies to reduce the incidence of breast cancer in women with a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation. I have supplied a chart below from the paper that shows the incidence % over time for women who did and did not get bilateral total mastectomies.
Link to interview with George Church: 1. Personal Genomics - LabXchange
Link to Article: Breast Cancer after Prophylactic Bilateral Mastectomy in Women with a BRCA1 or BRCA2 Mutation | New England Journal of Medicine (nejm.org)
