Tracy Hutchinson has a rare mutation of the TP53 geneTracy Hutchinson
I started to wonder if something funky was going on when multiple people in my family got cancer around the same time. In 1990, my older sister Rebecca was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, when she was 21 and I was 14. While she was undergoing rigorous chemo, my mum was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Rebecca passed away in 1994 and then, a couple of years after that, my dad got bowel cancer. While he was undergoing treatment, my mum got cancer in her other breast. She survived that, but then she was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2009. She had major surgery, but it came back and she died six weeks later.
In 2020, my other sister was diagnosed with fast-growing triple-negative breast cancer and I thought, oh my god, there’s something going on here. My sister was tested for the BRCA mutations, variants of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that increase breast cancer risk, and it came back negative.
So then she was tested for a different mutation in a gene called TP53, which is much rarer but even worse. Women with this mutation have nearly a 100 per cent chance of developing cancer anywhere in the body in their lifetime, with a 50 per cent chance before the age of 30. It’s called Li-Fraumeni syndrome and it basically means your TP53 gene, which normally functions as a cancer-suppressing gene, is a dud.
