It is an established fact that celebrities wield a great influence on people's decisions on health and purchases.
When Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue's diagnosis of breast cancer was reported in May 2005, it sparked an unprecedented increase in bookings for mammography. Similarly news about British reality TV star Jade Goody's diagnosis of cervical cancer in 2008 and her succumbing to the disease in February 2009 led to a surge in cervical screening.
Here's another example of how celebrities influence people's decisions on health.
Ever since actress Angelina Jolie announced that she had a preventive double mastectomy in 2013 after being diagnosed with a BRCA gene mutation that greatly increases breast cancer risk, there has been an unprecedented publicity on hereditary breast cancer.
Call it the Angelina Jolie effect, the number of preventative double mastectomies performed at Genesis Prevention Centre Family History clinic more than doubled to 83 during the 18 month period of January 2014 to June 2015 from just 29 between January 2011 and June 2012, reveal the researchers in a Letter to the Editor, published in the open access journal Breast Cancer Research.
Double mastectomy, which is a procedure of removing both the breasts, is sometimes used as a preventive measure for high-risk women - i.e. for individuals who have inherited mutations in BRCA1/BRCA2 genes.
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