Effectiveness of Prophylactic Surgeries in BRCA1 or BRCA2 Mutation Carriers: A Meta-analysis and Systematic Review

To systematically investigate the effectiveness of prophylactic surgeries (PS) implemented in women carrying BRCA1/2 mutations.

The PubMed database was searched till August 2014 and 15 studies met the inclusion criteria. Fixed- or random-effects models were conducted according to study heterogeneity. We calculated the pooled relative risks (RR) for cancer risk or mortality along with 95% confidence intervals (CI).

Prophylactic bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (PBSO) and bilateral prophylactic mastectomy (BPM) were both associated with a decreased breast cancer risk in BRCA1/2 mutation carriers (RR, 0.552; 95% CI, 0.448-0.682; RR, 0.114; 95% CI, 0.041-0.317, respectively). Similar findings were observed in BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers separately. Moreover, contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) significantly decreased contralateral breast cancer incidence in BRCA1/2 mutation carriers (RR, 0.072; 95% CI, 0.035-0.148). Of note, PBSO was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality in BRCA1/2 mutation carriers without breast cancer (HR, 0.349; 95% CI, 0.190-0.639) and those with breast cancer (HR, 0.432; 95% CI, 0.318-0.588). In addition, all-cause mortality was significantly lower for patients with CPM than those without (HR, 0.512; 95% CI, 0.368-0.714). However, BPM was not significantly associated with reduced all-cause mortality. Data were insufficient to obtain separate estimates of survival benefit with PS in BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation carriers.

BRCA1/2 mutation carriers who have been treated with PS have a substantially reduced breast cancer incidence and mortality. Clin Cancer Res; 22(15); 3971-81. ©2016 AACR.