will improve breast cancer screening. currently women with a family history of cancer are urged to do a genetic risk assessment. now medical officials now want doctors to consider a patient s personal medical history, which could lead to identifying the brca-1 or brca-2 genes that greatly increase breast and ovarian cancer risk. they hope the targeted screening will help save lives through earlier detection. ask your doctor. when we come back tonight, to the rescue for a beloved drama teacher. to the rescue for a beloved drama teacher. be right back. with moderate to severe crohn s disease, i was there, just not always where i needed to be. is she alright? i hope so. so i talked to my doctor about humira. i learned humira is for people who still have symptoms of crohn s disease after trying other medications. and the majority of people on humira saw significant symptom relief and many achieved remission in as little as 4 weeks. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, inclu
plans to fight any attempt to extra do it him from hong kong. the u.s. supreme court today ruling on an issue in the headlines recently because of actress angelina jolie. she brought this to our attention weeks ago. we re talking about the gene mutation linked to an increased risk of breast cancer. jolie revealed she had undergone a double mastectomy because of the mutation that put much higher risk per the disease. today the high court ruled that human genes cannot be patented. i want to bring in our cnn legal analyst paul cowen to talk about this and there is a lot of different layers to this. let s go through the case. it involves a company that basically identifies brca 1 and brca 2 gene mutations and the court made a decision whether or not they could be patented. tell us the significance. fascinating decision that will have a big impact on women
jolie and her left and right breasts. she and they were everywhere after we woke up to a tuesday morning new york times editorial from jolie about her difficult decision to undergo a prophylactic double mastectomy to reduce her likelihood of developing breast cancer. she knew the odds she was facing after a test revealed she had an 87% risk of developing breast cancer and a 50% risk of getting the ovarian cancer that killed her mother at age 56. jolie s tests came back positive for a mutation on a gene known as brca 1. mutations on these genes like the one found in jolie s tests exponentially increase breast cancer risk. a woman who has inherited the flaw in the genes is about five times more likely to develop breast cancer than a woman
belongs to me. here s how i chose to make these decisions. that said, i think the specificity of angelina s case, you mentioned, not all breast cancer is caused by this gene mutation. not all women chose the double mastectomy choice which is a radical choice. it s a specific choice because she has a high and unambiguous result to her test. as much as the single stories are incredibly res nant and it s brave to open up the world s scrutiny to her decisions and not everybody has access to that care, even once you have access to the care, there s a spectrum of choices you can make. part of what you guys are talking about, about choices and bodies, one of the tensions that i ve been thinking about, we keep talking about her breast but not about her ovaries. the other piece of this having lost a parent to ovarian cancer and brca will increase the likelihood of that for her, i wonder if there s something about breast that is we think of public property and less
shameful in part because there s been such a push around breast cancer research for the past sort of 20-some odd years where it s become more public. to talk about endometriosis. i had a hysterectomy in 2008 as a result of fibroid, which many african-american suffer from. to talk about uteruses and ovaries is still something we don t do. she chose to roll it out. but she is having surgery on her ovaries. it s much deadlier. that has been completely sort of obscured in all of this conversation. right. yet, ovarian cancer might be something we want to be talking about with brca. absolutely. ovarian cancer is a cancer that it s extremely difficult to screen for. it tends to be detected at a very late stage. that makes it more deadly. the mortality rates are much higher. stay with us. we re going to talk more about this. specifically about the pink washing of breast cancer and how that might be both good and bad for what s going on in america.