Angelina Jolie isn’t finished with her cancer-fighting crusade.
The actress — who this week revealed she’d had a preventative double mastectomy — hinted that she’ll follow that up by having her ovaries removed.
“I started with the breast, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex,” Jolie wrote in The New York Times op-ed that revealed her health saga.
The actress’ mom, Marcheline Bertrand, had breast cancer and died of ovarian cancer in 2007.
Jolie, herself a mother of six, learned from testing that she carries the flawed BRCA1 gene.
Because of BRCA1, Jolie’s doctors estimate she has a 50 percent chance of developing ovarian cancer — and “she is planning to have further surgery to remove her ovaries,” People magazine reported yesterday.
Removal of the ovaries is frequently done together with a hysterectomy to decrease ovarian-cancer risk.
It is common for women with the same flawed gene as Jolie to have both a mastectomy and hysterectomy, doctors said.
Flaws in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes increase cancer risk, and a positive BRCA1 result can give a woman a 30 to 45 percent risk of ovarian cancer, and a 60 to 80 percent risk of breast cancer, experts said.
A positive BRCA2 gene can give a woman a 10-20 percent risk of ovarian cancer and a 50 to 70 percent risk of breast cancer.
A hysterectomy would mean Jolie, 37, and longtime love Brad Pitt, 49, won’t add any more biological kids to their brood of six.
But the actress could put off the surgery for at least a year and likely two, doctors said.
Even before her mother died, Jolie — whose maternal grandmother also died young — was concerned about her own cancer-risk levels.
“There is no longevity on my mother’s side of the family,” she told Esquire magazine in 2007. “But my mother lived to see her grandchildren.”