Mother who found 31 cancer cases in family has double mastectomy

A mother of three underwent a double mastectomy after discovering that 31 of her relatives had suffered from breast cancer in the past 200 years.

Eleven years ago Alex Best, then 29, decided to look at her family tree, which medical experts have described as one of the most extreme in the country. A week later Miss Best had breast cancer diagnosed herself.

After learning of her family history, she had contacted a genetics expert, Professor Gareth Evans, to find out if she was also carrying the gene. By chance the research team had been studying her family tree but had not been allowed to contact surviving family members. A test confirmed that she was carrying the gene and had an 85 per cent chance of developing the disease.

A cancerous growth was found in one of her breasts so she decided to have both removed to avoid becoming the latest victim.

Miss Best, a former advertising representative from Wilmslow, Cheshire, said: “I was 16 when my mother was given four months to live. She struggled on for two years but she had a very large breast cancer, the size of an egg. Her four sisters also had breast cancer — it’s wiped my family out.”

The research team had drawn up a chart that was coded to show if relatives were dead or alive and revealed how Miss Best was one of 16 relatives suspected to be carrying the gene.

She continued: “What was really disturbing was that next to your name was a circle. It was coloured in completely if you were dead, white if you were alive and half if you could be a gene carrier. There was my name with a half-coloured circle. It was almost like sticking a pin in a voodoo doll.”

Professor Evans, a world-leading researcher in breast cancer genetics, based at the Genesis Prevention Centre in Manchester, said: “What we most of all want to do is stop women getting the disease in the first place and develop further strategies to reduce the risk of breast cancer.”

Ten years later Miss Best is still clear of the disease, thanks to ground-breaking treatment in Manchester.

She recently gave birth to a third daughter, Lucia, with her partner, John, despite having been told that she may never have been able to conceive again because of the six months of chemotherapy she had.

Genesis is Europe’s first breast cancer prevention centre. It opened last week. Miss Best hopes that it will help further medical improvements, sparing others the same ordeal.

She said: “I am hoping to God that by the time my girls have grown up there will be some kind of preventative gene replacement therapy available for families like ours.”

A possible link between asthma and obesity has been found by scientists in London (Nigel Hawkes writes). Scientists at King’s and Imperial Colleges in London have found that the Th2 cells that control inflammation in the lungs and contribute to asthma also produce a protein, encoded by the gene PMCH, which is known to increase appetite. The discovery was reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr David Cousins of King’s College London, said: “Our study provides evidence for a possible mechanism linking obesity and asthma. However, as people with asthma aren’t always obese, we now plan to look at possible genetic polymorphisms, or variations, of PMCH to see the role they play.”

source : www.timesonline.co.uk