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  Post-test counseling Genetic counselors will also help in discussing your personal risks, test results and options for next steps. BRCA tests are highly accurate. While experts say they may not be 100% accurate, the error rate is extremely low. Laboratories follow strict protocols to ensure mistakes do not occur. When to Get Tested If you fall under the above criteria and think you should do BRCA genetic testing, testing recommendations vary. “For women, especially because of the high breast and ovarian cancer risk, we recommend that people think about getting tested around age 25, because that’s when we start breast cancer screening,” Garber says. For men, though there’s no reason they can’t do it as early as 25, there’s not really a need until later in life. Garber says that if men carry the BRCA1 gene mutation, they have a 7 to 26% higher risk of developing prostate cancer than the general population; and if they carry the BRCA2 mutation, a 19 to 61% higher risk. “They wouldn’...

Massive, 1.2 million-year-old tool workshop in Ethiopia made by 'clever' group of unknown human relatives An illustration showing ancient human relatives making hand axes out of obsidian more than 1.2 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. More than 1.2 million years ago, an unknown group of human relatives may have created sharp hand axes from volcanic glass in a "stone-tool workshop " in what is now Ethiopia, a new study finds. This discovery suggests that ancient human relatives may have regularly manufactured stone artifacts in a methodical way more than a half-million years earlier than the previous record, which dates to about 500,000 years ago in France and England.