Boston (SmartAboutHealth) - According to a new study released this week, having a mastectomy on a healthy breast only slightly increases your chance of surviving breast cancer.

The study was carried out by researchers from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and focused on whether or not having a preventive mastectomy would help in terms of surviving cancer.

Often, when women develop breast cancer in one of their breasts and need to have a mastectomy, they opt for a double mactectomy.

The idea is to have this preventive procedure to cut down on their risk of developing cancer in the other breast, but does it help any?

Researchers have long-believed that having breast cancer in one breast increases your chance of developing it in the opposite breast.

What they have found though is that the benefit from the preventive double-mastectomy is only slight.

They carried out the study on a group of over women from 1998 to 2003, some having the double mastectomy and others not having it.

What they found was that after 5-years, the survival rat efor those who had a preventive mastectomy was 88.5%. This compared to 83.7% for those who did not have the preventive mastectomy.

Women who were between the ages of 18 to 49 were said to have more of an increase in regards to survival rate than compared to older women.

The survival benefit was not seen in all of the patients by any means, as researchers now stress that preventive mastectomies may not be as widely needed.

The study has been published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.