Should We Be Testing Everyone’s DNA?
Kelly Kashmer credits genetic testing with saving her life.
In 2014, during a routine medical appointment, a physician’s assistant began asking questions about her relatives and their experiences with cancer. As she mentally climbed her family tree, she recalled her grandmother on her mother’s side, and an aunt, had both been diagnosed with cancer. The details were fuzzy. (She’d later learn that both had died of ovarian cancer.) An aunt on her father’s side, too. But, she reasoned, they were all older than 60 when they were diagnosed. Kashmer was young – only 31 – and busy.
The PA recommended genetic testing for variations known to be linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancers. A mutation in a BRCA gene increases a woman’s lifetime risk of breast cancer fivefold, and cancer treatment, in general, is more successful during the earliest stages. Kashmer, who was focused on raising her two smart and spirited daughters, ages 1 and 3, didn’t know anything about mutations, risk, and screening.