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Greater Baltimore Medical Center to Treat Fear, Misunderstanding

Posted on: Tuesday, 27 September 2005, 12:00 CDT

By Karen Buckelew

Baltimore's Jewish women may be at an increased risk of developing breast cancer - but that doesn't mean they should be afraid, according to Greater Baltimore Medical Center.

The hospital this morning is hosting its Inaugural Breast Health Colloquium for Women in the Jewish Community, a three-hour event showcasing the hospital's genetics and oncology experts and intended to educate women about their risk, their screening options and developments in the treatment of the disease.

With advances in testing, treatment and prevention, local hospitals - including the Johns Hopkins Hospital, the University of Maryland Medical Center and Sinai Hospital - have started their own genetic screening and counseling programs for breast cancer, as has GBMC.

But, experts said, at-risk women are not using the programs as much as they should, out of fear or misunderstanding - which is one of the reasons GBMC chose to hold the program.

There's a lot of information that's out there about genetics, but there's a lot of misinformation, too, said Dr. Gary I. Cohen, director of the GBMC Cancer Center. We thought it was a good idea to help get the word out to the Jewish community [about] some of the facts.

The hospital, which sees about 600 new cases of breast cancer each year, decided to reach out to the region's Jewish population - about 100,000 strong - by inviting 100 local Jewish women leaders to its educational seminar.

Jewish women of Ashkenazic or Eastern European descent - as are most of the Baltimore area's Jews - are at an increased risk of carrying mutations in the BRCA-1 or BRCA-2 genes. Those mutations leave a woman at up to an 80 percent risk of developing breast cancer.

Five percent of breast cancer patients overall carry the genetic mutation. A woman with the mutation has a 50/50 chance of passing it on to each of her children.

Eighty percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer survive.

Whether or not Ashkenazic women are at an increased risk is controversial - some studies have shown no elevated incidence of breast cancer at all in the population, said Karen Andrews, a nurse practitioner in LifeBridge Health's medical oncology department at Sinai Hospital.

But another study showed that Ashkenazic Jewish women already at risk - meaning with a breast cancer patient in their immediate family - have two times the likelihood of developing the disease as Roman Catholic women with the same risk factors, said Andrews, whose doctoral research at the University of Maryland School of Nursing focused on Jewish women and genetic screening for breast cancer.

Studies also have shown that Jewish women are less likely to get genetically screened for the disease, though they may know they are at increased risk for breast cancer because of family history, Andrews added. Her own research examined the issue of modesty and its relationship to this aversion to genetic screening.

Jessica Rispoli, a genetic counselor with the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center, said most of her Jewish patients don't visit her of their own volition.

I do get a number of referrals from physicians, she said of the Jewish women she sees. But there have not been a lot of self- referrals.

Sinai attempted to hold its own educational program on Jewish women and breast cancer last year, Andrews said. No one attended.

GBMC's program is targeting the fears and misconceptions women within the population may harbor, said Cohen, who will speak to the audience on hormonal interventions - including hormones used to treat menopause and the risk factors they carry for the disease, as well as hormonal prevention and treatment programs for breast cancer.

Maimon M. Cohen, director of GBMC's Harvey Institute for Human Genetics, also will speak on his area of expertise, as will a radiologist and radiation oncologist.

Source: The Daily Record (Baltimore)

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