It was the type of typical fall morning destined to be forgotten.
And then the phone rang.
“I remember the surprise at realizing what I was hearing,” says Toddie Hays, 57. “The geneticist on the other end of the call did a wonderful job of conveying information in a thorough and caring way, telling me that I was positive for the BRCA2 gene mutation, and informing me of the implications.”
Women with a BRCA2 gene variant have a significantly higher likelihood of developing certain types of cancer, with some studies estimating a lifetime risk of up to 70 percent for breast cancer and 13 to 29 percent for ovarian cancer. The probability of breast cancer among the general population is about 13 percent. Ovarian cancer is rarer, but harder to detect at an early stage, affecting about 1 percent of the U.S. population…
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