BRCA Gene and Breast Cancer

Guest: Sandra Buys, MD, Medical Director of the High Risk Breast Cancer Clinic at Huntsman Cancer Institute and Professor in the University of Utah School of Medicine  You couldn’t have missed the news last spring of a rather private nature: actress and director Angelina Jolie Pitt announced in a New York Times column that she’d had her ovaries removed. The surgery came two years after she opted for a double mastectomy. Both procedures were prompted by a test that revealed Jolie Pitt had inherited a defect in the BRCA1 gene.