Longer term effects of the Angelina Jolie effect: increased risk-reducing mastectomy rates in BRCA carriers and other high-risk women

In May 2013 the actress Angelina Jolie informed the press that she had undergone bilateral risk-reducing mastectomy (BRRM) because she carried a maternally inherited pathogenic BRCA1 mutation. This decision created huge publicity worldwide [1] and led to enormous interest in hereditary breast cancer/genetic testing. Here we comment on our recently published research article in Breast Cancer Research and provide more recent observations. This reported a 2.5-fold increase in referrals of UK women with family histories of breast cancer 3–4 months following Ms Jolie’s revelation [1]. We also highlighted increased interest in BRRM; however, as it takes 9–12 months from initial BRRM enquiries to the operative procedure, we can now report a similar 2.5-fold increase in uptake of BRRM in the 6–24 months following this.