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Armed with knowledge from your unique genetic risk profile for breast cancer, you can start making preventive lifestyle choices.

Reducing your risk of breast cancer starts with knowing your risk

Genetic risk of breast cancer is part of the overall risk

All women are at some risk of developing breast cancer. As a woman grows older, her risk of breast cancer increases. When it comes to breast cancer prevention, age is a risk factor that obviously cannot be controlled, genetic risk is another. Although important, these risk factors are only part of the overall risk of developing breast cancer. Knowing how much these factors affect your risk of breast cancer can put you on the path to better prevention, by empowering you to take control of the environmental and lifestyle-related risk factors of breast cancer that can be changed.

deCODEme calculates your genetic risk of breast cancer

The deCODEme Complete Scan and the deCODEme Cancer Scan both include a genetic test that identifies these common breast cancer variants, and provides interpretation of their associated life-time risk of developing breast cancer.

Risk factors for breast cancer

The two primary classes of known risk factors for breast cancer are hormonal factors and genetic factors:

Hormonal risk factors for breast cancer

• Hormonal factors. During a woman’s menstrual cycle, the levels of the hormones estrogen and progesterone increase and decrease in a set pattern. Estrogen is known to cause abnormal growth of breast tissue. During a woman’s lifetime, she will experience around 450 menstrual cycles and be exposed to increased levels of estrogen with each cycle. Factors that increase the lifetime exposure to estrogen tend to increase breast cancer risk:
• Age is one of the strongest risk factors. Breast cancer is quite rare in women under 35, while the risk is considerably higher in women over 60.
• Delaying childbirth also increases risk by increasing the total number of menstruation cycles over a woman’s lifetime.
• For similar reasons, menstruation that begins early in life (before age 12) and late menopause (after age 55) significantly increases breast cancer risk.
• Long-term use of hormone replacement therapy, which includes estrogen, also increases breast cancer risk.

Genetic risk factors for breast cancer

• Genetic factors: play a contributing role in the majority of breast cancer cases. Having two or more close blood relatives with breast cancer or ovarian cancer may indicate the presence of a mutation in a gene that is associated with an exceptionally high risk of breast cancer, such as the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Mutations that are associated with these very high risks of breast cancer are however present in only a small percentage of breast cancer patients (2-5%).

Please note that the deCODEme genetic scans do not test for BRCA1 or BRCA2 variants. The possibility of having these rare variants should be discussed with your doctor.

Common genetic risk variants

There are several more common gene variants, that carry less risk than BRCA1 or BRCA2 variants but play a role in a much larger proportion, if not all breast cancer cases. Eleven common variants have been found to increase the risk of developing breast cancer: on chromosomes 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 14, and 16 (see scientific details).

deCODEme can calculate the combined genetic risk of known common variants

While each of these variants on its own is associated with only a small increase in risk of breast cancer, the combined risk can be high if a person inherits many of these variants. Combinations of these common breast cancer risk variants may be difficult to trace through family history. The deCODEme genetic risk test for breast cancer can calculate for you the combined genetic risk associated with these eleven common variants.

More information on risk factors for breast cancer

For more information about risk factors for breast cancer visit the National Cancer Institute´s interactive Web site about cancer risk and how to lower your risk.

This content was last reviewed on February 09, 2010.

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