Angelina Jolie says she underwent a preventive double mastectomy earlier this year after learning she carries a gene that increases her risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer.
In a New York Times op-ed published late Monday, the 37-year-old Academy Award winner writes that after genetic testing she learned she carries the 'faulty' BRCA1 gene.
The risk of developing cancer due to the gene varies, but Jolie says doctors estimated she had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer.
Jolie — whose mother, actress Marcheline Bertrand, died from cancer — says she decided to have the preventive mastectomy to be 'proactive' for the sake of her six children with her partner, Brad Pitt.
'My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56,' Jolie writes. 'She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.'
Jolie said she has kept the process private so far, but wrote about with hopes of helping other women.
'I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy,' she writes. 'But it is one I am very happy that I made. My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need .