I never thought I had all that much in common with the glamorous film star Angelina Jolie – until May of this year, when she decided to tell the world about her family history of breast cancer, the results of genetic testing, and the decision it led her to take. She wrote poignantly and yet in a matter-of-fact way about the consequences of finding she does carry a BRCA1 mutation that predisposes her to breast and ovarian cancer and deciding to have major preventative surgery so as to reduce her risk of dying prematurely from the disease that killed her mother.
My personal story diverges from hers in one key respect, and I feel that this version of the tale is, for good clinical reasons, aired far less often by those who deal with the new frontiers of genetic/genomic and personalised medicine. What do we do when the test results provide no clear message for the person concerned?
Read the full, original story here: A Dispatch from the Genetic Frontier
