Angelina Jolie’s 87% cancer risk
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This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. Melting the statistical chocolate chips in the great news cookie of life. This week, is British political personality Christine Hamilton right about Romanians in the UK?
68,000 of them are already here, of whom 28,000 have been arrested for serious offences since 2008.
But first... Earlier this week, Hollywood actor Angelina Jolie wrote in the New York Times that she'd undergone a preventative double mastectomy. Jolie's doctors had estimated that she had an 87% risk of developing breast cancer. That's a very specific figure, so we've been having a closer look at it. And Ruth Alexander's here. Hello, Ruth.
Hello. It is very specific and high. So how would this figure have been calculated? Well, we asked Dr Kat Arney, a senior science manager at the charity Cancer Research UK.
There are various computer programmes where you put all sorts of things in. You put genetic information, family history, all sorts of stuff in and it spits a number out, which is why she's probably got this very precise sounding number. By having her breasts removed, you remove most of the tissue that could become cancerous. She still says that she has around a 5% chance of developing breast cancer, which is about half of that of an average woman in the general population. But by having this operation, she's got rid of most significant amount of the kind of tissue that could become cancerous and cause her a problem.
So we think that effectively a computer algorithm has created this figure of 87% based on Angelina's genetic makeup and her family history.
That's right, but it was the presence of a certain mutated gene that stacked the odds against Angelina and made her take this drastic step. The BRCA1 gene is present in everyone, but mutates in roughly one in every 1,000 women and then can be a trigger for both breast and ovarian cancer. However, if a parent has the mutated gene, and Angelina's mother did, she died of ovarian cancer at the age of 56... then their children have a one-in-two chance of inheriting it. Katani explains.
We know it is actually more common in certain groups, but certainly if you carry this faulty gene, you do have a greatly increased risk of developing the disease. So for breast cancer, your risk of developing breast cancer goes from about 12% on average to between 50% to 80%, or even more, depending on exactly the kind of fault you have and a number of other factors, for example, the other genetic variations that you have on top of that too.
Kat Arney said there that the risk of getting breast cancer is on average 12%. Now, that's much lower than Angelina's estimates of an 87% risk, but it's still very high, Ruth.
Yes, this is an average figure for the UK that Kat was giving, that a woman has a 12% chance of getting breast cancer. Now, this is a lifetime risk. A third of all incidences of breast cancer occur in women aged over 70. So it's quite common in later life, but these are statistics from the UK.
I guess the story changes depending on where in the world you are.
It does. The UK statistics, though, are similar to those in the United States and in other Western European countries. The lowest breast cancer rates are in Middle and Eastern Africa, where women are four times less likely to be diagnosed with the disease than women in the UK. Here's Katani again.
In a lot of African countries where women have children younger, they have more children and they breastfeed them for longer, that does decrease breast cancer risk.
Why did Angelina Jolie have a preventive double mastectomy and what was announced?
So rates of breast cancer are relatively low. But unfortunately, there are many other types of cancer that tend to affect people in those countries, more things like cervical cancer and cancers linked to infectious diseases.
Kat Arney from Cancer Research UK and Ruth Alexander, thank you. Our esteemed colleagues at the BBC radio programme Any Questions have been in touch to say that one of their panellists, the political personality Christine Hamilton, had come out with a baffling figure.
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