Genetic testing

But if you could wrap it up for someone today to say, If you get one thing out of this talk today, what would you say?

I would say get your DNA testing done because that's really your baseline for understanding what your next steps need to be.

It's going to help you understand what type of exercise best impacts your body.

It's going to help you understand what foods, what food groups are best gonna mix well with you and what's not.

What do you think about people who have a family history? I got this call a couple months ago because another friend of mine who doesn't live in this area has breast cancer.

She said, what do you think about genetic testing? I'd love to know your opinion on genetic testing and where that falls in this whole realm.

So may I ask how

old your friend is? She's 54.

If you have a family history of breast and ovarian cancer, you should have genetics done.

We're even looking at family histories that include prostate and pancreatic cancer at this point in time as well.

So there's very few patients that don't qualify for getting genetic testing done, and especially in the premenopausal setting, genetics should be done as well.

I think that we're going to start to find that genetic predisposition is probably a lot higher than the statistics that we've been quoting, because in my opinion, we haven't been testing enough people.

And so interestingly enough, the conversation that I have with a lot of patients is you, as a person who's had cancer, you have more information for people than what we know about BRCA1 and BRCA2.

BRCA1 and BRCA2, there was a population of Anishinaabe Jews that actually a lot of these like genetic testing happened from this group of this small population of Jews that agreed to get tested.

And so BRCA1 and BRCA2 was very common, mostly in Caucasians.

And it's not as uncommon in black people.

And so I think it was AMT or something like that.

But it was essentially my mother was supposed to get tested to see if she had the same gene.

And then they could see like essentially is this gene something that we need to worry about or is it not a big deal? So of course now we know that the Genome Project and all these genetic testings, now there's so many genes that have been determined.

And I think that's powerful because even someone who's gotten tested 20 years ago should probably get retested, especially if they have had like cancer or something, because that gives a lot of information.

But there was a lovely story.

It was a woman who was live tweeting at the time because her mother had done one of these tests when they first came out, the DNA tests.

Yeah.

Sent out samples and so on.

And I say, that's all fine and good, and I don't distrust 23andMe.

However, we're going to repeat that with some medical genetic testing to make sure, because I'm not going to act on something that we can't prove.

Another question we had here, it says, so that we can feel good about research, are there some cancers that were once feared, but now research has dramatically reduced their fatality rates?

Speaking about breast cancer specifically or other cancers?

I was in the hospital at UCLA for about three and a half weeks, but went through sudden menopause, just boom, like hit me.

never had another period again and just completely started losing hair and i just panicked and and freaked out and you know really looked at what was going on in my body my body's immune system it had to kind of research and just cobble stuff together i wish i knew you then uh because it was quite the the journey so can there be i know that with pima we can talk about a sudden event And I see behind you, and I love the fact that genetic testing and epigenetic analysis, but is there, is it a combination of things that causes it? Like, I always think mine was a little bit the perfect storm, right? I had massive infectious component, massive fevering, and then, you know, had what they call premature ovarian steadier because I, I call it my periods due to having that infectious meningitis event.

But I was just like, It was just crazy for my body and wearing it through.

Well, and so I'm going to take you back a moment.