Word: estrogenous
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...likely that, in addition to surgery and radiation, she's already received three of the most commonly used drugs - Adriamycin, Cytoxan and either Taxol or Taxotere. This potent regimen knocks out tumor cells and causes the familiar side effects of nausea and hair loss. If her original tumor was estrogen-sensitive - meaning growing in response to the hormone - then she is almost certainly taking an estrogen-blocking drug such as Tamoxifen. (See TIME's photo-essay "The Diary of Healing...
...Since those therapies failed to control her cancer, Edwards now faces treatment with other medications. If she's on hormone therapy, says Russell, the first step would be switching her to another kind; there are four or five options. If her tumor isn't sensitive to estrogen, she'd go straight to chemotherapy, but probably with a well-tolerated oral drug like Xeloda. These kinds of treatments are taken as pills and have relatively few side effects. Continuing to campaign while taking them doesn't seem unreasonable...
...Dalby is clearly an expert forager, with a love for digging at the roots of things, be they customs or words. She tells us that it was a German moon goddess, Eostre, who gave her name to both Easter and to the female hormone estrogen, and she explains that in old China, a hawk and a dove were considered to be the same bird, seen in a different light. She retells the poignant story of the compiler of the 16,000-page Great Chinese-Japanese Classical Dictionary, who saw the proofs of 12 of his 13 volumes reduced...
Over-capacity or not, the event was—unsurprisingly—under-capacity on the estrogen front...