Word: cancers
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...idea that we might one day find a cure for cancer seems axiomatic to anyone trying to understand the disease. That was the goal, after all, of the War on Cancer promoted by President Richard Nixon in 1971. But given the enormous complexity and variety of malignancies and the ways they can evolve and migrate in the body, an all-embracing cure is a naive hope. Instead, cancer doctors now appreciate that wayward cells may not necessarily have to be destroyed, just corralled and contained in a safe and tolerable way, often with drugs that are taken for the rest...
...payoff is being seen in longer and better-quality survival. According to the American 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...
...That new perspective provided fertile ground for the growth of new classes of cancer therapies. While older drugs were like heavy artillery - obliterating cancer cells but causing lots of collateral damage - newer drugs are more like smart bombs. Some of them target communication signals within malignant cells, some cut off supply lines by interfering with the growth of blood vessels around a tumor, and others block the chemical agents that enable tumors to expand into new territory. These more targeted therapies tend to focus on frantically proliferating cancer cells while leaving healthy cells intact...
...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...