Although most media focuses on the initial struggle to defeat breast cancer, the life of survivors can be just as hard.
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The breast cancer guideline recommends patients to constantly visit their clinicians and take regular screenings to prevent recurrence.
Survivors of breast cancer with TRL were found to have personal and family histories that suggest inherited cancer susceptibility.
However, in patients with no symptoms, the current evidence does not support routine laboratory tests or medical imaging (scans), except for mammography when indicated, the guidelines say.
Primary care clinicians should counsel patients to adhere to anti-estrogen therapy.
Primary care clinicians should assess patients for distress, depression, and/or anxiety.
Certain cancer treatments that target tumor cells can also impact normal, healthy cells and may increase a patient’s risk of developing leukemia at a later date.
With that, two major cancer organizations in the United States collaborated to create comprehensive and clear health care guidelines for survivors of breast cancer.
Researchers now plan to further study the link between breast cancer treatments, family history of breast cancer and risk of leukemia in survivors. But with better therapies to control the cancer systemically and improved imaging that finds ever-smaller deposits of cancer in other parts of the body, it may be time to see whether surgery also can help increase the length of survival times, they said.Aggressive local therapy may benefit select women, such as those with an already established potential for durable remission, they wrote in their paper. In that kind of research, its impossible to filter out the countless reasons that a woman and her doctor might have made the decision to treat the cancer with or without surgery, leaving the conclusions unreliable for clinical decision-making, he said.Its premature to suggest, and its a hard conversation to have with patients, that removing the breast will help them live longer in the face of Stage 4 disease, Sabel said. As Dr. Judith Karp and Dr. Antonio Wolff-both from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore-note: “Existing familial cancer registries that are prospectively following breast cancer patients and their families are uniquely positioned to ascertain the true frequency of subsequent leukemias and their associations with the therapies received”.
“The findings justify a long-term, follow-up study of women with and without inherited breast cancer gene mutations who are treated with similar therapy for breast cancer”, said study Dr. Churpek in a news release.
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As if the experience of battling the dreaded breast cancer is not enough to cause anguish and emotional torture, recent study findings show that women who were breast cancer survivors are also at risk of getting leukemia as a complication after treatment.
