May 22, 2013
Genetic screening for breast cancer
A round-up of some worthwhile links on Angelina Jolie and BRCA1
- Angelina Jolie. My Medical Choice
- Hilda Bastian (evidence-based medicine specialist and cartoonist) Keeping Health Risks in Perspective When the Dramatic and Rare Goes Culturally Viral
- Melanie Tannenbaum (social psychology) Why It Matters That Jolie Wrote About Her Medical Choice
- David Gorski (surgical oncologist and curmudgeon) Angelina Jolie, radical strategies for cancer prevention, and genetics denialism
- Gayle Sulik (medical sociologist) Angelina Jolie and the one percent
- Breast cancer screening in NZ. BRCA genetic testing is recommended and subsidized only for women with a strong family history, and where possible should start by testing one of the affected relatives to make sure that the familial pattern is actually due to BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations, not some other gene.
- What’s actually patented in the evil gene patent. The most important part of patent covers the short ‘mirror-image’ DNA molecules needed by the current testing technology: it will be a race to see if sequencing-based tests make the patent obsolete before it expires in 2015 (or, potentially, is overturned by the US Supreme Court later this year).
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »