How Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Tools Work: Cancer Currents
, by Elise Tookmanian, Ph.D.
Credit: iStock
In March 2024, when the actress Olivia Munn announced that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, she highlighted a breast cancer risk assessment tool she used on her path to diagnosis. In the latest Cancer Currents: An NCI Cancer Research Blog post, Ruth Pfeiffer, Ph.D., senior investigator in the Biostatistics Branch, and Peter Kraft, Ph.D., director of the Trans-Divisional Research Program, discuss how breast cancer risk assessment tools are created and how people can use them to understand and manage their risk.
Drs. Pfeiffer and Kraft stressed that while these risk assessments are informative, they cannot predict the future for any one individual. Dr. Kraft said, "It’s really important that [people] talk with a health care provider about what the risk estimates mean for them."
Our researchers are involved in the creation and improvement of risk assessment tools for several different types of cancer, including breast, colon, lung, thyroid, and melanoma. One way to improve the models is to acquire more data. Dr. Pfeiffer said, "The more data we have, and the more representative those data are of the populations in which we would use a model, the better that model will perform."