MyBreastRisk was the first commercially available test to combine genetic, family history and lifestyle factors to determine your personal lifetime breast cancer risk.
In humans, 99.9% of the building blocks that make up our DNA are the same, but a SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism, pronounced SNIP) is a single building block that is altered and kept through heredity. It is these SNPs that give us our unique appearance and make us different from each other, but they can also be linked to an increased risk of certain diseases such as breast cancer. Unlike the well-publicised breast cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA 2, which are incredibly rare in the population but confer a massive lifetime breast cancer risk of up to 60-90% if present, SNPs are much more common in the population and each SNP confers a small increased breast cancer risk. We now know of at least 77 SNPs that increase breast cancer risk and the more you have, the higher the risk.
Analysis of all 77 SNPs can now be performed on a saliva DNA sample, the result of which when combined with a lifestyle and family history questionnaire provides a risk score, that can stratify women into different levels of breast cancer risk (low, moderate or high risk). The risk score allows women at higher lifetime risk of breast cancer to start breast screening at an earlier age, and have more frequent screening, whilst women at lower risk require less screening. There is good scientific evidence to show that this risk-stratified type of breast screening is more effective.