Frank talk about family breast cancer risk urged

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Women from families who openly talk about their family history of breast cancer are more knowledgeable about genetic counseling and testing, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

And that may make them more likely to get tested, they said.

Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center and George Washington University Hospital undertook the study to understand why black women participate less in genetic counseling and testing for breast cancer genes than do white women.

While they were unable to pinpoint key differences between the two groups, they did find that when a woman knows her family's breast cancer history, she is better informed about the need for testing.

"Families who talk about cancer appear to know more about cancer risk," Kristi Graves, a clinical psychologist at Georgetown, said in a telephone interview.

"What that likely means based on other studies is that this could help women seek out services related to their cancer risk," said Graves, who presented her study at the American Society for Preventive Oncology meeting in Bethesda, Maryland.

Graves and colleagues interviewed 105 women by telephone who had a low to moderate risk of breast cancer and one or more relatives with breast and or ovarian cancer. Of these, 75 were white and 30 were black.

The researchers covered a host of topics: cancer history, perceived risk and worry, mistrust of doctors, whether the woman was fatalistic about cancer, her communication with her doctor, racial discrimination and her knowledge and attitudes about testing for the BRCA 1 and 2 breast cancer genes.

Women with faulty copies of these rare genes have a 50 percent to 85 percent chance of getting breast cancer in their lifetimes.

Overall, the researchers found little difference in basic knowledge about cancer risk between black and white women after considering level of education.

For all women, the more family members they talked to about their breast cancer history, the better informed they were about genetic risk.

The upshot, Graves said: "Talk about your family history of cancer. The more you know, the more you are likely to do something to prevent cancer down the road."

Breast cancer kills 500,000 people a year globally according to the World Health Organization, and 1.2 million men and women are diagnosed with it every year.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Todd Eastham)