Word: breast
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...DEFINITION The cancer has spread beyond the breast, leading to secondary tumors in the liver, lungs, brain or elsewhere...
...shrink any tumors. Chemotherapy. Herceptin for those cancers that express an excess of the Her2 receptor. Tamoxifen or an aromatase inhibitor, if they haven't already been used, for those tumors that respond to estrogen. (Clinical trials of both herceptin and aromatase inhibitors in earlier stages of breast cancer are under...
There is no single cause for breast cancer, but one major factor is estrogen. That's a shocking thought. The same hormone that softens our skin, thickens our hair and fills out our hips and breasts also feeds disfiguring tumors. Rates of breast cancer are highest in developed nations, in part, scientists believe, because with better nutrition we reach menses earlier and menopause later, allowing estrogen to course through our bodies for that much longer...
...there is a bright side to all this, it is that estrogen is now pointing the way to new breast-cancer treatments. One of the most exciting developments in the field is a new class of drugs called aromatase inhibitors, which for postmenopausal women are already in use against late-stage tumors and may prove even more effective when tumors are caught early. Aromatase inhibitors block the action of an enzyme that these women need to produce estrogen. Two new studies suggest that the drugs can shrink tumors before surgery and also perhaps prevent breast cancer from recurring. More than...
These drugs could one day replace tamoxifen, which is routinely given to women at high risk for recurring tumors, and raloxifene, a newer drug that was originally designed to prevent osteoporosis but also appears to block breast cancer. Known as "designer estrogens," tamoxifen and raloxifene work by taking the place of the body's natural estrogen on the surface of breast-cancer cells, preventing the real thing from stimulating tumor growth...