This piece is part of a series of stories on the breakthroughs reshaping breast cancer screening and prevention to personalize care, detect cancer earlier, and save lives. Read the rest of the stories here. Gabrielle Hansen had suspected from a young age that she was at higher risk for developing breast cancer.
A 29-year-old from Buffalo, New York, Hansen has blue eyes and a sheet of strawberry blonde hair. She is funny and matter-of-fact, and describes her family history with cancer without any detectable self-pity. When she was a toddler, she says, her mother, who was then 35, had been diagnosed with stage II breast cancer.
A breast cancer diagnosis before middle age can indicate the presence of mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes. These mutations can increase a woman’s likelihood of getting breast cancer from 13 percent (the risk of the average woman) to up to 72 percent. In 2011, when Hansen was 14, her mother received genetic testing and confirmed that she carried a BRCA2 mutation.
Eight years later, Hansen’s older sister received the same result. Hansen knew she should get tested as well, but she was slowed by the inertia of her early 20s, when building a life and a career seem so urgent. Given her mother’s cancer and her sister’s test results, Hansen was disciplined about beginning routine screenings at 25; her insurance covers screenings starting 10 years prior to the age at which a first-degree relative received a cancer diagnosis.
But the possibility of cancer still felt far-off. But in 2024, when Hansen was 27, her sister, then 30, was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. Her sister had also been receiving regular screenings since she found out she carried the BRCA2 mutation and even had a cancer-free MRI within the year; her cancer had developed quickly. (Both Hansen’s mother and her sister are survivors.) That August, shortly after moving to Chicago, where she’d long dreamed of living, Hansen decided to get genetic testing done at Northwestern Medicine.
She was unsurprised when she tested positive for the BRCA2 mutation. The result, and the pain of watching chemotherapy poison her older sister’s typical optimism, galvanized her. Her mother accompanied her to a high-risk breast clinic to discuss her test results with a genetic counselor.
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