Targeted Therapies and Breast Cancer

  All of us have heard the buzz around "targeted therapies", and most of it is good. The simplistic definition is that these are molecular agents that are designed to attack a particular part of a breast (or other) cancer cell. Rather than trying to kill the whole cell all at once, as does chemotherapy, a targeted therapy uses stealth to depower or kill or otherwise ruin a single tiny part that then makes the whole cell inoperable--or dead. Think of tamoxifen (perhaps the first targeted therapy although it wasn't called that) and ER positive breast cancers or, more recently, herceptin and her2 positive ones. Read more... Comments (0)

Caffeine Intake and Coffee and Breast Cancer Risk

  I debated whether or not to write about this, but decided that it is too good an example of the deluge of confusing and conflicting news to ignore. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will remember that not long ago, I wrote about a study that suggested that moderate coffee drinkers had a lower risk of breast cancer than those who drank less or no coffee.

Read more... Comments (0)

Prophylactic Mastectomies

  I have written before about the increasing incidence of prophylactic bilateral mastectomies for women with early breast cancer who "only" need surgery on one side. It is terrifying to hear the cancer word, and most of us are frantic to do whatever we can to protect ourselves now and to insure our future good health. For some women, that translates to a strong wish to "get rid" of the other breast, a possible source of another crisis in the future. It may not be soothing to be told that the future risk of a second cancer in the other breast is very small, about 1% per year, and that breast cancer almost never goes to the other breast. The worries of cancer spreading are that it might metastisize to another part of the body; removing the second breast does nothing to minimize that risk. Read more... Comments (0)

Same Issues in England

  It is always comforting to me to realize that others share our concerns. There is nothing surprising in this article from the BBC about survivorship issues in England and the need for physicians to expand the conversation beyond the specific medical concerns. People completing cancer treatment the world over must share the same worries about returning to work, families, sexuality, energy, etc. The health care system is somewhat different in Britain, and GPs (general practitioners, similar to our PCPs) seem to do more of the oncology follow up than is generally true in the US. Studies here have suggested that women who are followed by their PCPs after breast cancer treatment do just as well as those who continue to see their medical oncologists, but that is generally not the system. I suspect, in the era of more attention to costs, that may become increasingly true here, too. It is less expensive to see the PCP than to see a specialist.

Read more... Comments (0)

Coffee and Recurrence

  There hasn't been the same amount of attention paid to any relationship between coffee and breast cancer risk or recurrence as there has been to any associations with alcohol. However, a group in Sweden has just published the results of a study that suggest that, for women with a hormone positive breast cancer, drinking at least two cups of coffee (and, no, I don't know if that means a Grande or something bigger) may cut the rate of recurrence by half. Read more... Comments (0)