Angelina Effect
TIME
Monday, May. 27, 2013
The Angelina Effect
By Jeffrey Kluger; Alice Park There's a chilly arithmetic to the way we all get sick. At the end of any year, a fixed and knowable number of us will have developed heart disease, and another number won't have. There will be a different entry in the ledger for cancer, another for lung disease, another for Parkinson's or dementia or HIV. The people who study those mortal metrics--the actuaries, the epidemiologists--don't give too much thought to the individuals behind the numbers, and the truth is, they can't. It's no good sentimentalizing math--not if you want to get anything useful out of it. But sometimes it's impossible not to: sometimes the person who is sick has a very recognizable face. So it was in 1985, when Rock Hudson, Hollywood heartthrob of an earlier era, died of complications from AIDS and a country that thought it could fence off a disease suddenly realized we were in this together. So it was in 1995, when Christopher Reeve, a man best known for playing a character utterly immune to injury, was thrown from a horse and suddenly could do nothing at all without help--and with that, the spinal-injury community had a point man a lot more powerful than Superman. And so it was again when Angelina Jolie, the most beautiful woman in the world by a lot of people's lights, stepped forward and announced in an op-ed in the New York Times that she had undergone a double mastectomy, an operation she decided to have after learning that she carried a genetic mutation that in her case increased the odds of developing breast cancer to a terrible 87% and ovarian cancer to 50%. She decided to get tested because her mother died of ovarian cancer at age 56. Jolie herself has no current signs of either disease. She explained her treatment decision with a simple clarity: "Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and minimize the risk as much as I could." She explained it with an eye toward the 12% of
Monday, May. 27, 2013
The Angelina Effect
By Jeffrey Kluger; Alice Park There's a chilly arithmetic to the way we all get sick. At the end of any year, a fixed and knowable number of us will have developed heart disease, and another number won't have. There will be a different entry in the ledger for cancer, another for lung disease, another for Parkinson's or dementia or HIV. The people who study those mortal metrics--the actuaries, the epidemiologists--don't give too much thought to the individuals behind the numbers, and the truth is, they can't. It's no good sentimentalizing math--not if you want to get anything useful out of it. But sometimes it's impossible not to: sometimes the person who is sick has a very recognizable face. So it was in 1985, when Rock Hudson, Hollywood heartthrob of an earlier era, died of complications from AIDS and a country that thought it could fence off a disease suddenly realized we were in this together. So it was in 1995, when Christopher Reeve, a man best known for playing a character utterly immune to injury, was thrown from a horse and suddenly could do nothing at all without help--and with that, the spinal-injury community had a point man a lot more powerful than Superman. And so it was again when Angelina Jolie, the most beautiful woman in the world by a lot of people's lights, stepped forward and announced in an op-ed in the New York Times that she had undergone a double mastectomy, an operation she decided to have after learning that she carried a genetic mutation that in her case increased the odds of developing breast cancer to a terrible 87% and ovarian cancer to 50%. She decided to get tested because her mother died of ovarian cancer at age 56. Jolie herself has no current signs of either disease. She explained her treatment decision with a simple clarity: "Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and minimize the risk as much as I could." She explained it with an eye toward the 12% of