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Most women with the most common form of early-stage breast cancer can safely skip chemotherapy without hurting their chances of beating the disease, doctors are reporting from a landmark study that used genetic testing to gauge each patient's risk.
Cancer care has been evolving away from chemotherapy - older drugs with harsh side effects - in favor of gene-targeting therapies, hormone blockers and immune system treatments. When chemo is used now, it's sometimes for shorter periods or lower doses than it once was. The breast cancer study focused on cases where chemo's value increasingly is in doubt: women with early-stage disease that has not spread to lymph nodes, is hormone-positive (meaning its growth is fueled by estrogen or progesterone) and is not the type that the drug Herceptin targets.
Source: http://abc7ny.com/health/study-finds-that-many-breast-cancer-patients-can-skip-chemo-/3557439/
Breast cancer: Test means fewer women will need chemotherapy
About 70% of women with the most common form of early stage breast cancer can be spared the "agony of chemotherapy", researchers say. It follows trials of a genetic test that analyses the danger of a tumour.
Cancer doctors said the findings would change practice in UK clinics on Monday, and meant women in this group could be treated safely with just surgery and hormone therapy. Charities said the news, affecting 3,000 UK women a year, was "wonderful".
Also at NPR.
Adjuvant Chemotherapy Guided by a 21-Gene Expression Assay in Breast Cancer (open, DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1804710) (DX)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @12:04AM (1 child)
If this were generally true, I'd still be fascinated how it could get detected early enough, so that surgery is sufficient to make the cancer go away, and not have metastases settled in the liver already.
(Score: 2) by ben_white on Friday June 08 2018, @04:55PM
This is reasonable and rational thinking but probably incorrect. Almost certainly the ability to cure tumors surgically is more dependent on the biology of the particular cancer than in early detection. For most patients the die is cast with respect to their ultimate fate at the time the genetic mutations occur when the cancer starts. Careful meta-analyses of studies looking at the efficacy of screening (for breast, prostate, GI cancers, see here for example WashPost [washingtonpost.com]) struggle to find robust benefits. This is probably due to the fact that even early detection of "bad" cancers, with the worst combos of genetic mutations doesn't yield cures in most cases.