Do Ashkenazi Jews have a higher incidence of breast cancer than the general population?
At this time, scientists cannot answer this question definitively. Recently, Canadian and U.S. scientists identified alterations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes in several families with multiple cases of breast, or breast and ovarian cancers. These high-risk families were all from an Ashkenazi Jewish background with roots in Eastern Europe. More than 90 percent of the estimated six million US Jews are Ashkenazi, according to Jewish sources. Although some epidemiologists have suggested that Jewish women in the United States have higher breast cancer rates, most of these studies have not looked at how much of this increased breast cancer risk can be explained by other known risk factors. Most breast cancer studies in general have not recorded whether participants are Jewish. In addition, the US Census Bureau does not record this information for individuals in the US population, making this a harder question to study.
