BRCA2 and Friedreich ataxia: King et al. (2003) found that carriers with inherited heterozygous mutations in BRCA2 have a high risk for developing breast and ovarian cancer. Similarly, heterozygous BRCA1 mutations can also cause hereditary breast and ovarian cancer syndromes and the biallelic loss of BRCA1 genes would cause FA development. Other FA genes, such as BRIP1/FANCJ and PALB2/FANCN, were also identified as breast cancer susceptibility genes (Seal et al., 2006; Rahman et al., 2007).