During the focus group meetings the impacts of the different risk-reducing interventions were discussed based on the impacts included in the two methods.
Risky Medicine is a timely call for a skeptical response to medicine's obsession with risk, as well as for higher standards of evidence for risk-reducing interventions and a rebalancing of health care to restore an emphasis on the actual curing of and caring for people suffering from disease.
Ultimately, improved decisions and appropriate use of risk-reducing interventions are expected to decrease the incidence and burden of breast cancer.
BreastHealthDecisions.org is designed to encourage appropriate use of risk-reducing interventions by identifying women at highest risk, informing patients and supporting their preferences.
To predict the effects of risk-reducing interventions, expected numbers of events were extrapolated for the years 2010 2030 using the corresponding annual extrapolated populations from Finnish statistics.
Studies of women's decisions about breast cancer prevention and screening conclude that women have a tendency to overestimate both their risk of breast cancer and the risks of side effects associated with risk-reducing interventions, leading to suboptimal decision making.
Nevertheless, in many health care systems access to breast cancer risk-reducing interventions is contingent upon having a high breast cancer risk as assessed by one of these models.
Optimizing management strategies requires knowledge of the benefits and limitations of the presented strategies, ongoing investigation with newer surveillance techniques and risk-reducing interventions, and informed decision-making between patient and provider.
Our results suggest that these measures may be useful for predicting response to RRSO and ultimately assisting in clinical decision making regarding risk-reducing interventions for BRCA1/2 carriers.
As opposed to the families with deleterious variants – where asymptomatic relatives can be offered DNA diagnosis, and carriers are eligible for risk-reducing interventions and/or surveillance – presymptomatic testing is not possible in families with a UV, and surveillance can only be based upon the severity of the cancer family history.
