Christina Applegate Gets Real About Her Body After Breast Cancer — elle.com

Christina Applegate knows how lucky she is. When the actress and all-around funny lady was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008, she managed to catch it early, largely because her doctor suggested further testing beyond the usually-recommended mammogram. "I had gotten a mammogram every year from the time I was 30 years old," Applegate told me when we spoke on the phone last week. "And my doctor finally said, 'You know, I can’t see. It’s too dense in there. We need to go deeper.' And we did, and I had cancer." It was an MRI that revealed her diagnosis, and a series of other tests that identified, among other things, that Applegate is a carrier of the BRCA gene, which denotes a much higher susceptibility for developing breast and ovarian cancer. (It's the gene that Angelina Jolie's doctors also identified, leading the actress, like Applegate, to get a double mastectomy.)

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