Dr Jennifer Ligibel, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, is launching a major trial looking at whether losing weight can cut the chance of breast cancer coming back. Such tests now cost around £2,000 – around half the cost of a £4,000 course of chemotherapy.
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“While the use of the drug may have a survival benefit for some breast cancer patients, those who developed breast cancer while already using metformin may have more aggressive cancer subtypes”, said Yun Rose Li, MD, PhD, the lead author and a fellow in the Endocrine and Oncology Surgery division at Perelman.
Professor Fred Saad, a cancer specialist at Canada’s Montreal University, who is leading the trial, said cancer patients should be given a personal trainer alongside their medication.
Immunotherapy is becoming more and more widely used in treating patients with cancer but a team of researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center say that those suffering from lung cancer and also have autoimmune diseases will not be able to be part of the latest immunotherapy treatments. The trial showed that risk of breast cancer coming back reduced by nearly one-third when the hormonal therapy was continued for a period of 15 years.
Side effects were similar between the two groups. “At COTA we’ve made it our commitment to improve patients’ lives and outcomes while reducing the wasteful spend of inappropriate care by making the best care clear”.
But some experts were cautious about predicting changes in treatment strategies.
The UK’s National Lung Matrix is already trying to match a new generation of targeted lung cancer drugs to the unique flaws in patient’s tumours.
In an ASCO news release, he said that “longer [aromatase inhibitor] therapy also showed a substantial breast cancer preventative effect in the opposite, healthy breast”.
In the study, presented at the Asco conference in Chicago, 666 women were split into two groups.
“In the United Kingdom, more than 40,000 women are diagnosed with an oestrogen-positive breast cancer each year”.
She said she was anxious it would not “get through to the women who could benefit – the majority of women with advanced breast cancer”.
The results will be presented at the Cancer Prevention, Genetics, and Epidemiology poster session on Monday, June 6, from 8 a.m.to 11:30 a.m. CT in Hall A.
“Aromatase inhibitors are now readily available around the world and therefore our results will further improve the outcome of women with breast cancer globally”, said Prof.
The researchers said the risk of disease recurrence and of a new cancer in the opposite breast was 34 percent lower among women who continued the aromatase inhibitor drug for 10 years compared to those who received a placebo after the initial 5 years of treatment.
Looks like the era of chemotherapy and radiation might become a thing of the past with a new method called precision medicine being studied to treat cancer patients in the future.
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The Metastatic Breast Cancer Project aims to address that gap, encouraging patients via social media and through advocacy groups to share tissue and saliva samples and clinical information. It paid off: 95% of patients who enrolled provided detailed info on their cancer, treatments and experiences; more than 1,000 gave researchers access to copies of their medical records and allowed them to conduct next-gen sequencing on their tumor samples; and more than 400 sent saliva samples collected at home in to the Broad. Metastatic breast cancer-also known as stage 4 breast cancer, when the disease has traveled to other parts of the body-causes almost 100% of breast-cancer deaths, but only about 7% of research dollars are dedicated to this stage of the disease.
