Understanding BRCA Mutations and Preventative Double Mastectomies

We have many, many young patients come in and they've been tested. They found they're positive. They understand their risks after genetic counseling, and they're opting for bilateral mastectomies and reconstruction. We can help counsel those patients to get, you know, reasonable expectations, but they have a very high standard of how they want to look. In this patient, she came to me. She's BRCA positive. You can see from her photos she's very asymmetric to begin with. She wants to use her own tissue. She's not interested in implants. In this procedure, we use the tissue from the lower abdomen connected to the skin fat and blood vessels in that area, the deep flap. We transport that up to the chest and hook it to the blood vessels underneath the breastbone. She wanted to decrease her chance over a lifetime of having breast cancer, so she opted to have bilateral mastectomies and bilateral immediate breast reconstruction using the deep flap. She also, if you look at her photos, really developed into a more symmetric, more shapely figure for herself.