WHY FREE SCREENINGS?
IT’S THE 90/10 RULE! When the first cell in one of Brenda Rosenthal’s ovaries mutated and turned cancerous, she felt no symptoms. The telltale pains or lumps that signal cancer were still months, if not years, away. But there were signs, sparks thrown off by the tumor that had begun to smolder in her belly. As more cells were conscripted from the original task coded in their DNA and assigned a new, malignant mission, they produced proteins that leaked into Rosenthal’s bloodstream. Had an effort been made to see these molecules, had there been a strategy for detecting them, the 69-year-old wouldn’t face such long odds today. Certainly, there were statistical red flags, if only Rosenthal had known to look for them. Twenty years before, she had survived a bout of breast cancer, increasing her risk for ovarian cancer in the future. That risk was exacerbated by a mutation in her BRCA2 gene that’s been associated with much higher rates of breast and ovarian cancers. Going purely by the numbe
