Is a preventative mastectomy advisable for high risk women?

Is a preventative mastectomy advisable for high risk women?

Whether or not to have a preventative mastectomy is a very individual decision and it comes down to what a woman's risk for developing breast cancer is over her lifetime and how comfortable she is with that risk. There are some women who have BRCA mutations which are mutations that they're born with, that run in their family, that increase their risk of developing breast cancer to about 85% over their lifetime. For most women, that's a high enough risk that they're not comfortable with just increased screening because, even with screening, breast cancer can grow, it can spread. The goal of screening is to catch it early, when it's curable, but when there's such a great risk of it occurring, potentially, getting a bilateral prophylactic mastectomy and removing the breasts before the breast cancer has a chance to occur will decrease her chance of developing breast cancer to just a couple percent, if that. And women who get prophylactic bilateral mastectomies usually can get immediate reconstruction with plastic surgery so that they do not have to live without breasts, and their chance of developing breast cancer is very low.