JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
World Ovarian Cancer Day occurs in early May, the same week as Mother’s Day. This year Jennifer Coken is observing both days with the publication of her new memoir, “When I Die, Take My Panties: Turning Your Darkest Moments into Your Greatest Gifts.” The book chronicles her journey through her mother’s diagnosis and 2011 death….
Last week on Rosh HaShanah, I looked out at the sea of faces in synagogue and declared: “Today, I stand before you, my heart full of joy for having made it to this day. I am not cancer-free, but the medications I’m now taking are gentle, and are controlling the disease.” The congregation erupted: Amen….
We’ve long known that the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations commonly found in Ashkenazic Jewish women are linked to higher rates of breast and ovarian cancer. A new report published online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology provides more details about ovarian cancer risk. The report notes that women who have the BRCA1 or BRCA2…
When Marcia Watson-Levy was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997 at age 58, she suspected that heredity played a role: Her sister Rhoda had died of breast cancer 12 years before, at 52. Yet Watson-Levy, who then lived in San Francisco, said that none of her physicians — her primary doctor, her surgeon or her…
Regulatory hurdles, along with dosing problems, have come to plague a new class of cancer drugs that showed highly encouraging results in early research. Those obstacles have frustrated breast and ovarian cancer patients who are carriers of cancer-causing mutations, particularly prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews, and for whom it was hoped the medicines would prove especially…
The genetic mutations that greatly increase a woman’s chance of getting breast cancer — mutations that are common among Ashkenazi Jewish women — also put her at high risk for ovarian cancer. So it makes sense that Sharsheret, which, since 2001, has been offering free support services to young Jewish women living with (or at…
