WASHINGTON, March 18 (UPI) -- The inclusion of newly discovered genetic factors modestly improved the performance of risk models for breast cancer, U.S. researchers said.
Researchers from the National Cancer Institute and colleagues said the level of predicted breast-cancer risk among most women changed little after the addition of currently available genetic information.
The researchers used information on traditional risk factors and 10 common genetic variants associated with breast cancer in 5,590 case subjects and 5,998 control subjects, 50-79 years of age, from four U.S. cohort studies and one case-control study from Poland.
The researchers calculated the fraction of case subjects in quintiles of estimated absolute risk after the addition of genetic variants to the traditional risk model.
Using the traditional breast cancer risk model, the researchers were able to predict breast cancer 58 percent of the time. Adding 10 genetic variants, the number rose slightly to 61.8 percent, the study said.
The findings are published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
