UCLA
Elisa Long is studying why some patients might overestimate their risks in the face of serious disease and how they can become more literate around their treatment options.
Elisa Long, informed by personal experience, parses data to help those mulling mastectomy and gynecological surgeries. UCLA Anderson Review - Elisa Long was 33 years old and new to the UCLA Anderson faculty when her research and her life grimly intersected. Specializing in medical decision making under uncertainty, she routinely studied how to weigh difficult decisions, often in the absence of complete information. Newly diagnosed with breast cancer — she would soon learn that she is also a BRCA1 mutation carrier — Long was confronted with a critical dilemma of her own: How long could she delay prophylactic surgery to remove healthy organs and still avoid further cancer and risk to her life? Up to 65 percent of women with BRCA1 gene mutations and 45 percent of women with BRCA2 mutations develop breast cancer by age 70, compared to 12 percent in the general population. Nearly half of breast cancers in BRCA mutation carriers occur before the age of 50. Two-thirds of women with BRCA1-related breast cancers develop triple-negative tumors, making them immune to the most effective cancer treatments. A BRCA1 mutation also raises the lifetime risk of ovarian cancer, a particularly deadly disease, to 39 percent from about 1.5 percent.
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