This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related letter  • Related article  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Genetic Disorders  • Statistics and Research Methods  • Oncology  • Breast Cancer  • Alert me on articles by topic

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: In their study of limited family structure and breast cancer risk, Dr Weitzel and colleagues¹ showed that women with early onset breast cancer and without a relevant family history may be at higher risk of carrying a BRCA mutation than is generally understood. However, we believe that the authors exaggerate the inadequacy of the BRCAPRO predictive model for women with limited family structure and that their proposed correction is subject to biases that make it unlikely to be validated with future data.

By virtue of its mendelian construction, BRCAPRO properly accounts for family structure, family size, sex differences in penetrance, and missing data.² It will predict the proportion of carriers correctly (ie, be calibrated), provided that the inheritance model and its parameters are correctly specified.³ The authors focus on individuals with early onset breast cancer and no family history of breast or ovarian cancer. Members of the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Edwin S. Iversen Jr, PhD
iversen@stat.duke.edu
Department of Statistical Science
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina

Hormuzd A. Katki, PhD
Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics
National Cancer Institute
Bethesda, Maryland

Sining Chen, PhD
Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland

Donald A. Berry, PhD
Department of Biostatistics
M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
University of Texas
Houston

Giovanni Parmigiani, PhD
Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland

RELATED LETTER

Limited Family Structure and Breast Cancer Risk—Reply
Jeffrey N. Weitzel, Veronica I. Lagos, and Deborah J. MacDonald
JAMA. 2007;298(17):2007-2008.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

RELATED ARTICLE

Limited Family Structure and BRCA Gene Mutation Status in Single Cases of Breast Cancer
Jeffrey N. Weitzel, Veronica I. Lagos, Carey A. Cullinane, Patricia J. Gambol, Julie O. Culver, Kathleen R. Blazer, Melanie R. Palomares, Katrina J. Lowstuter, and Deborah J. MacDonald
JAMA. 2007;297(23):2587-2595.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT