Prophylactic Mastectomy — The Price of Fear

Recent progress in understanding the genetic basis of susceptibility to breast cancer has simultaneously allowed the identification of women at increased risk and spawned controversy over their care. Like such contentious issues as the utility of genetic testing, the question of prophylactic mastectomy elicits a wide range of opinions. However, the evaluation of divergent views of the efficacy of prophylactic mastectomy has been severely hampered by the almost complete absence of facts.The literature on prophylactic mastectomy is fraught with problems. Most important, there are no prospective, controlled trials of the reduction in the risk of breast cancer associated with . . .