She Got a Hysterectomy Because of Family History. Then She Found Out She Was Adopted.
Consumer genetic testing is resulting in some truly traumatic medical surprises
In her early fifties, Linda Minten began experiencing symptoms of what her doctor believed might be ovarian cancer. She was bloated, bleeding, and in pain. An ultrasound was inconclusive, but testing found an elevated level of a tumor biomarker. The fact that Linda had recently learned she was likely about half Ashkenazi Jewish through her mother worried her because it increased her likelihood of having a BRCA1 or BRCA2 variant, which would put her at higher risk of that kind of cancer.
Wondering if her father might also have Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, further increasing her risk of these variants, Linda decided to find out more about her ancestral heritage. Like over 30 million Americans, she turned to consumer DNA testing for more information. She sent her spit into the largest of these databases, AncestryDNA. She also ordered a clinical-grade test from a company called Color to look for many mutations that increase cancer risk.
Linda’s father had passed away decades earlier, but Linda told her mother what was going on and consulted her on the family’s health history, which included two maternal relatives with cancer…
