Word: breast
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...change in managing cancer reflects a series of hard-won improvements in treatment - not, alas, for every form of cancer, but particularly for breast, colon, prostate and even lung. The gains include an explosion of new drugs that are more targeted and less toxic than old-school chemotherapeutic agents. In addition, new tests are beginning to help doctors match drugs more precisely to the genetic and molecular makeup of an individual tumor. Finally, there are remarkable advances in managing the side effects of treatment, which, in the past, could be as debilitating as cancer itself...
...Cancer Society, the percentage of people living five years after a diagnosis of any type of cancer barely budged from 50% in the mid-1970s to 52% in the mid-'80s, but it shot to 66% for patients with a diagnosis after 1995 and is continuing to rise. For breast cancer patients the five-year survival numbers leaped, from 75% in the '70s to nearly 90% by 2002. Receiving a diagnosis of cancer - and seeing that cancer return - is always a terrible blow. But in fact, there is no better time to be living with the disease...
...Breast cancer is the model for treating cancer as a chronic disease, largely because it's the focus of so much research and drug development. "We have a ton of drugs that work for breast cancer - eight or nine - more than for any other cancer," says Dr. Christy Russell, co-director of the Norris Breast Center at the University of Southern California. The approach for someone with metastatic disease like Elizabeth Edwards, says Russell, is to use a drug until it stops working - as it almost inevitably will - and then switch to something else, possibly buying years of relatively good...
...Since 60% to 70% of breast cancers grow in response to estrogen, half a dozen drugs, beginning with tamoxifen, introduced in the late '70s, work by blocking that hormone. Such drugs prevent cancer recurrences for 10 years or more in 50% of women with estrogen-sensitive tumors. Even for those with metastatic disease, hormone therapy can lengthen life and frequently will be more effective than chemotherapy. (Edwards told TIME, however, that her cancer was only slightly sensitive to estrogen, though she's waiting for new biopsy results to reveal "what receptors and markers I have...
...Many newer drugs target other pathways for tumor growth. Herceptin, introduced in 1998, interferes with a protein called epidermal growth factor by blocking the her2 receptor, a binding site that is found on the surface of many cells but is overabundant in about 25% of breast cancers. Other smart drugs interfere with the same growth factor, using slightly different chemical strategies to do so, and some have proved useful in a range of cancers. Gleevec, for example, which was approved in 2001, prevents growth factors from attaching to cancer cells and activating an enzyme called tyrosine kinase, which regulates cell...