Cancer survival 'not affected by faulty BRCA gene'

AztraZeneca Executive Vice President and Head of the Oncology Business Unit Dave Fredrickson said: "This new approval for Lynparza makes it the first and only PARP inhibitor approved in metastatic breast cancer, and the only PARP inhibitor approved beyond ovarian cancer".

The actress Angelina Jolie underwent a preventative double mastectomy in 2013, aged 37, after learning she was at high risk of developing breast cancer due to a defective BRCA gene.

The study involved 127 hospitals across the United Kingdom and included 2,733 women aged 18 to 40 who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer for the first time.

She said she was now keen to understand how women fared more than 10 years after their diagnosis. About 45 percent of women with faulty BRCA2 genes will.

About a third of those with the BRCA mutation had a double mastectomy to remove both breasts after being diagnosed with cancer, the same surgery Jolie went through.

It suggests that although women diagnosed with breast cancer at a young age tend to have a poorer outlook, those who have BRCA gene faults aren't less likely to survive.

The good news for young women who carry the infamous BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene is that their chances of survival after conventional breast cancer treatment are the same as those who don't have the mutation. Most had chemotherapy, half has what's called breast-conserving surgery instead of a complete mastectomy, the other half had a full mastectomy and a very few did not have any surgery. "Understanding prognosis in young patients is important because patients with BRCA mutations are at increased risk of developing specific conditions, such as secondary cancers, including ovarian cancer, contralateral breast cancer, and de novo breast cancer in the same breast".

Previous studies or meta-analyses comparing outcomes in women with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations and those with sporadic breast cancer have reported inconsistent effects of these mutations on patient outcomes.

"The study found that there was no difference in overall survival two, five or ten years after diagnosis for women with and without a BRCA mutation", a press statement said. This surgery did not appear to improve their chances of survival at the 10-year mark, according to the findings published in The Lancet Oncology. This action prevents DNA inside BRCA-mutated cancer cells from being repaired, which can stop tumor growth.

PALB2 - Works similarly to the BRCA genes.

She added: "In view of this, younger women with breast cancer can take time to discuss whether radical breast surgery is the right choice for them as part of a longer-term risk reducing strategy".

The research, led by the University of Southampton, concludes that BRCA-mutated breast cancer is no more risky or aggressive than any other form of the disease.