The discovery by scientists of four more genes that can, if faulty, predict if a woman is at increased risk of developing breast cancer will have no immediate impact on patients, the chairman of the Irish Cancer Society's medical committee has said.
Dr John Kennedy, who is also a cancer specialist at Dublin's St James's Hospital, said the results needed to be confirmed and generalised. "However, the data do tell us where we should look for further information on the causes and development of breast cancer," he said.
Dr Kennedy said about 20 per cent of women with breast cancer had a family history of the disease and about 5 per cent had a very strong family history.
The genes which scientists already knew about accounted for only a quarter of all inherited cases of breast cancer. The four genes now identified account for a further 4 per cent of such cases.
Details of the discovery were published online in the journal Nature yesterday.
The author of the study, Douglas Easton, director of Cancer Research UK's genetic epidemiology unit in Cambridge, said: "We're very excited by these results because the regions we identified don't contain previously known inherited cancer genes. This opens the door to new research directions."