New Study Could Help Curve Breast Cancer Relapses
Filed in archive Breast Cancer by Terah Shelton on December 13, 2007
There's great news on the fight against breast cancer. A study released today reported that women who are fighting breast cancer can be spared the agony of chemotherapy. The study discovered that women who were give a less harmless version of the drug, Adriamycin, were less likely to suffer a relapse or die.
The findings are sure to speed the growing trend away from chemo for many breast cancer patients and targeting it to a smaller group of women who truly need it, doctors said Thursday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, where the studies were reported.
"We are backing off on chemotherapy and using chemotherapy more selectively" in certain women, said Eric Winer, a doctor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
The gene test in particular "will start changing practice nearly immediately," said Dr. Peter Ravdin of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "The results are compelling that this test ... helps select patients who will most benefit from chemotherapy."
Breast cancer is the most common major cancer in American women. More than 178,000 new cases are expected this year. Most are helped to grow by estrogen, and hormone-blocking medicines like tamoxifen are used to treat those.
Chemo usually is added if the disease has spread to lymph nodes
- a situation faced by about 45,000 U.S. women each year. Doctors know that chemo won't help most of these women, but they have had no good way to tell who can safely skip its cost and misery.Permalink: New Study Could Help Curve Breast Cancer Relapses
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