Word: cancers
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...while the benefit may seem slight, Bedrosian notes that in cancer terms, any percentage boost in survival is meaningful, particularly to patients. And when women are facing the decision to lose a healthy breast, every piece of information counts. (See more about health care...
...Anderson study highlights the combined effect of three major factors in improving breast-cancer survival: age, type of tumor and stage of cancer. Taken together, this suite of criteria makes sense, says Bedrosian. Women with estrogen-positive cancers can be treated with hormone-therapy drugs like tamoxifen or, if they are postmenopausal, the new aromatase inhibitors, which block the production of cancer-enhancing estrogen in the body. Women whose tumors lack the estrogen receptor, however, cannot take advantage of these drugs, since their cancers are not as dependent on estrogen for fuel. As a result, they have a lower survival...
...from women who do not," says Dr. George Sledge, president-elect of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and a professor of medicine at Indiana University. "They may be overall healthier in that they see their physician more frequently, and their physicians may be more aggressive in treating their cancer in terms of what chemotherapy they use, and therefore these women may happen to have a greater benefit from having received more generally aggressive treatment...
...Larry Norton, a breast-cancer expert at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, agrees and cautions against applying these findings immediately to the clinic. "This is an observational study, and hence it is impossible to control for confounding variables," he says, "and should not be used for individual clinical decisionmaking." But Norton acknowledges that the ideal study - in which women would be randomly assigned to either have a double mastectomy or not - could never be done, since it would not be ethical to prevent women from having a procedure known to reduce the risk of cancer recurrence...
...findings clearly do not apply to every breast-cancer patient, she says, but at the very least, it's one more piece of information that women and their doctors can discuss when weighing their best treatment options...