Women who carry BRCA mutations face some genuinely difficult choices. There is no single “right” answer, and each prevention strategy comes with trade-offs:
- Enhanced surveillance means regular mammograms combined with MRI. It doesn’t involve surgery and it doesn’t lower your risk of getting cancer. What it does is aim to catch things early.
- Prophylactic mastectomy can significantly reduce breast cancer risk, but it is major surgery. It can affect body image, sexuality, and long-term wellbeing in ways that are hard to predict in advance.
- Salpingo-oophorectomy reduces both ovarian and breast cancer risk. But it affects fertility and brings on early menopause, which carries its own set of health implications.
- Chemoprevention (tamoxifen, raloxifene) offers risk reduction without surgery. It does come with side effects, though, and it means taking medication over a long period.
To give some sense of scale: in Czechia, only about 25% of high-risk women choose prophylactic mastectomy, and uptake of other preventive measures ranges from 18% to 64.7%. These numbers suggest that access to clear, personalised information still has a long way to go.
This section will be updated with more detailed data from each partner country as findings from the project’s cross-country research become available in late 2026 and early 2027.