Tailoring BRCAPRO to Asian-Americans.

To the Editor We read with great interest the work of Kurian et al,1 investigating the performance of BRCA1/2 mutation prediction models in Asian-Americans. Their work is of broad impact, as Asians account for 5% of the US population and more than 60% of the world population. Two key observations in their article are that (1) the BRCAPRO model2 (http:// astor.som.jhmi.edu/BayesMendel/brcapro.html ) underpredicts the proportion of BRCA2 mutations relative to the total number of mutations, and (2) it under-predicts the total number of mutations of both genes among Asian-Americans. Motivated by these observations, we have developed a revised version of BRCAPRO, specific to AsianAmericans. Here we present new analyses comparing earlier version of BRCAPRO to this newly developed version, and hopefully provide additional insight into the interpretation of the important study of Kurian et al.