Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie has revealed that she has undergone a double mastectomy to lower the risk of her getting breast cancer - the disease that killed her mother almost a decade ago.
In an article for The New York Times entitled 'My Medical Choice,' Jolie says that she completed three months of medical procedures at the end of April that she had so far managed to keep out of the public eye.
Jolie explains that her own mother died of breast cancer at the age of 56 and that she herself had the 'faulty' BRCA1 gene, which increased her chances of getting the disease to 87 per cent, and of getting ovarian cancer to 50 per cent.
The 37-year-old Tomb Raider actress and humanitarian activist says the reason behind her decision was to reassure her children - of which she has three biological and three adopted - that the illness that took their grandmother would not do the same to her.
In the article, she writes: "I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.
"It is reassuring that they see nothing that makes them uncomfortable. They can see my small scars and that’s it. Everything else is just Mommy, the same as she always was."
She also thanks her partner Brad Pitt, describing him as "so loving and supportive".
Following her surgery, which involved breast reconstruction with implants, the actress' chances of developing the cancer have dropped to under 5 per cent.
She says her decision to write about her experience came from wanting to reassure other women that they "have options".
"I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer," she writes.
"It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options."
Credit: Independent UK
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