Breast Cancer: Ultralow Risk Patient’s New Hope

Breast Cancer:

The scientific question posed that made this discovery possible is: 

Could a new test accurately predict survival rates for breast cancer patients who fall within a specific category (ultralow risk)?

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in all women and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in women. Due to these statistics, many of the cancer-management treatment regimes have been unnecessarily aggressive.

I have summed up the main points of this article from Medical News Today here.

The root of the situation is to try to avoid aggressive treatment with women who’s lives are not severely threaten by their breast cancer.

Dr. Esserman examine the MammaPrint test, which was approved by the FDA in 2007, to see if there was hope for ultralow cancer risk patients.

MammaPrint is a 70-gene signature test that is widely used to determine which patients do not need adjuvant chemotherapy.

The study concluded that women who have a tumor that is classified as ultralow risk by 70-gene signature can be reassured that their long-term outcome is expected to be excellent with or without endocrine therapy. 

However, the test also categorized 15% of the patients as “ultralow risk.” These patients had “excellent long-term survival,’ regardless of whether or not they took tamoxifen (cancer drug) for 2 years.

Dr. Laura Esserman concluded with these remarks:

This is an important step forward for personalizing care for women with breast cancer. We can now test small node-negative bread caners, and if they are in the ultralow risk category, we can tell women that they are highly unlikely to die of their cancers and do not need aggressive treatment, including radiation after lumpectomy.

These kinds of results are amazing because they give women with an ultralow risk of this type of cancer an opportunity to not undergo such tumultuous and aggressive treatments that can be hard to endure without the need for it.