Word: womens
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...hope this study helps women make a better decision," says Bedrosian. "For the majority of women in the study, we can't document a survival benefit for you. So our results provide some reassurance that perhaps a [preventive] mastectomy is not necessary, perhaps overly aggressive and perhaps a bit too much...
...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...
Whether the findings are sufficient to translate to the clinic, though, is another matter. Some experts are not convinced - yet - that the study results should be part of clinical decisionmaking, pointing out that many factors other than mastectomy may be driving the increase in survival. "Women who undergo a [preventive] mastectomy in the unaffected breast may be different 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...
...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...