Journal of Clinical Epidemiology
Volume 50, Issue 5 , Pages 547-556, May 1997

Assessing individual risk for breast cancer: Risky business☆

  • Anne McTiernan

      Affiliations

    • Corresponding Author InformationAddress for correspondence: Anne McTiernan, Cancer Prevention Research Program, MP-1002, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 1124 Columbia Street, Seattle, WA 98104.
    • Cancer Prevention Research Program, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, Washington, USA
    • ,
  • Mary Ann Gilligan

      Affiliations

    • Cancer Prevention Research Program, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, Washington, USA
    • Department of Medicine, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
    • ,
  • Carol Redmond

      Affiliations

    • Department of Biometry and Epidemiology, College of Medicine, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina, USA

Accepted 7 February 1997.

Abstract 

There is increasing demand for prediction of individual women's risk for breast cancer from women, clinicians, researchers, and health planners. Risk assessment for breast cancer is the process of identifying characteristics of an individual woman that are relevant to her risk, and combining those characteristics into a quantitative or qualitative risk profile. This article reviews and compares available methods of predicting risk, discusses benefits and drawbacks to the methods, and compares risk estimates for several hypothetical subjects using the different methods. Current and future uses for risk assessment are described. Risk assessment, while a promising tool for research now, and for clinical areas in the future, is still too imprecise for accurate prediction of breast cancer occurrence in individuals.

Keywords:  Breast, neoplasms, risk, risk assessment, risk estimates, etiology

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☆ This work was supported in part by grant number RO1 HG/CA 011 01 from the National Center for Human Genome Research and National Cancer Institute, and grant number 1-R25-CA-5773 from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health.

PII: S0895-4356(97)00013-9

Journal of Clinical Epidemiology
Volume 50, Issue 5 , Pages 547-556, May 1997

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