Film director and Academy Award-winning actress Angelina Jolie has revealed in an oped in this morning’s New York Times that she underwent surgery to remove her ovaries, two years after having a double mastectomy in an effort to reduce her likelihood of developing ovarian and breast cancers.
Ms Jolie’s genome includes the BRCA1 gene, which is used to predict breast and ovarian cancer in women. Her mother, Marcheline Betrand, as well as her grandmother and aunt, all succumbed to ovarian cancer, and Ms Jolie explains that her decision to go under the knife was prompted by her doctors’ warning that she should consider the surgery when she is a decade younger than when cancer first presented in her relatives.
On today’s Right Hook, George talked to Dr John Coulter, a consultant at Cork University Hospital and an expert in inheritable diseases about Angelina Jolie’s decision and what it means for Irish women.
When celebrities come forward with the news that they have been screened for cancer and chosen to lie on the operating table, more men and women with family histories of cancer undergo counselling and gene testing, according to research.
In the six months following Ms Jolie’s mastectomy revelation, British researchers noted that testing for the BRCA1 gene doubled, while overall referrals to hereditary cancer clinics jumped from almost 2,000 to 4,800 in the two months following her original New York Times’ article in 2013.
“A lot of us around the U.K. noticed that many of women were getting referred to us for hereditary breast cancer, and a lot of them mentioned Angelina as part of the reason,” said lead study author Gareth Evans, a professor of cancer epidemiology at the University of Manchester.
“It made women come forward who wouldn’t have otherwise,” Evans said. “It somewhat demystified the issue of genetic testing.”
The so-called ‘Angelina Effect’ is not isolated to the Hollywood actress, with similar bumps in cancer screening having been observed when pop star Kylie Minogue battled the disease 10 years ago. Media researchers have also concluded that some readers of celebrity health stories report that news of this kind impacts their own behaviour and how they discuss health matters.
Prof Amanda Hinnant of the University of Missouri-Columbia, who published award-winning research on the impact of celebrity journalism on consumer health behaviours, says that celebrities can be catalysts for serious discussions. She believes that a reader is more likely to respond to a celebrity health story if that person has past experience with the specific issue in question.
But this celebrity effect is not without its flaws, with a recent research paper claiming that while stories of this nature do attract considerable public attention, the media squanders the chance to educate and inform the public about illness. While the public shows interest in seeking information about disease, media outlets traditionally give greater focus on the celebrity, to infuse stories with emotional and dramatic bias.
