Women with breast cancer before the age of 55 who have a mutation in the genes inherited breast cancer susceptibility BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes are four times more likely to develop breast cancer in the forehead, or contralateral their initial tumor compared to breast cancer patients without these genetic defects. These results, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Breast Cancer Epidemiologist Kathleen Malone, Ph.D., and colleagues, were published online April 5 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Compared with noncarriers, the breast cancer patients with BRCA1 mutation have a risk 4.5 times higher and those with a BRCA2 mutation have a 3.4 times greater risk of subsequent breast cancer, researchers have found. Carriers of both mutations who were diagnosed with breast cancer before 55 compared to 18 per cent chance of developing cancer is cumulative in the opposite breast within 10 years, compared with a cumulative probability of 5 percent among women who had no mutation.

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A drug already prescribed to reduce benign prostatic hypertrophy has been shown to reduce the risk of a diagnosis of prostate cancer by 23 percent in men at high risk of disease, a major international study has found. The results are presented on 1 April in the New England Journal of Medicine.The four-year study has found that dutasteride (Avodart ®) significantly reduced the likelihood that men will be diagnosed with tumors that are most often treated as too: those who fall in the middle range of aggressiveness. These tumors, which represent the majority of all prostate cancers, grow in unpredictable ways. This uncertainty has led many men to choose surgery or radiation therapy – treatments that can lead to incontinence and impotence.

“The dutasteride can potentially provide thousands of men one way to reduce the risk of being diagnosed with prostate cancer,” says study author Gerald Andrioli, MD, Robert Killian Royce, MD, Professor Emeritus and Head of Urology at the University of Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis. “This means more men can avoid unnecessary treatment for prostate cancer, as well as the costs and negative side effects that may occur with treatment.”

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