Angelina Jolie’s 87% cancer risk
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thank you for downloading More or Less from the BBC. This is the version of the programme first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 17th May 2013. Here's Tim Harford.
Hello and welcome to More or Less, melting the statistical chocolate chips in the great news cookie of life. This week we try to unravel the mystery of the UK unemployment figures and is Christine Hamilton right about Romanians?
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.
Now, Katani 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, a woman in the UK has a 12% chance of getting breast cancer during her lifetime. So it's a lifetime risk. And a third of all incidences of breast cancer occur in women aged over 70. The chance of a woman developing breast cancer before the age of 30 is very slim, one in 2,000. That goes up to one in 50 before the age of 50, and one in 13 before the age of 70.
How was Angelina Jolie’s 87% breast cancer risk calculated?
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. 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.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:13
2
How was Angelina Jolie’s 87% breast cancer risk calculated?
3:13–8:27
3
What does a BRCA1 mutation mean for lifetime breast cancer risk?
8:27–16:23
4
How much does geography and lifestyle change cancer risk?
16:23–20:01
5
What proportion of people will develop some form of cancer in their lifetime?
20:01–23:12
6
Are Christine Hamilton’s Romanian crime statistics accurate?
23:12–24:04