This week's artwork was donated by Lonny, a pediatric cancer patient who received treatment at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia . Improvements in screening techniques have made significant contributions to the early detection of breast cancer.
Physicians thus face the task of providing appropriate screening schedules for their patients.
One group for whom this is particularly important are those women with a family history of breast cancer. The data set also includes family histories of breast cancer in mothers and sisters of both patients and control subjects. Genetic models fit previously to these data by the authors have provided evidence for a rare autosomal dominant allele that results in increased susceptibility to breast cancer. In addition, these models predict that women who carry the allele are at greater risk of developing breast cancer at any age than are women who do not carry the allele. The increase in risk in carriers versus noncarriers does, however, decrease with increasing age.