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Delays of more than 6 weeks from time of diagnosis until surgical treatment of breast cancer among young women significantly decreases survival times compared to those with a shorter treatment delay time, according to a study in JAMA Surgery. “This adverse impact on survival was more pronounced in...
Results from a multicenter phase II study of patients with locally advanced HER2-positive breast cancer who receive targeted therapy with trastuzumab (Herceptin) and lapatinib (Tykerb) “support the hypothesis that selected patients with HER2-positive tumors may not need chemotherapy,” investigators ...
Follow-up imaging for patients with benign breast biopsies can be safely done at 12 months rather than 6 months, when radiologic and pathologic findings are concordant, according to a study reported at the American Society of Breast Surgeons Annual Meeting in Chicago.1 Current guidelines from the...
Clinicians should engage in shared decision-making with women who are at increased risk of breast cancer about using medications, such as tamoxifen and raloxifene (Evista), to reduce risk, and should offer prescriptions to women considered at low risk for adverse effects from these medications,...
The epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) sends signals that thwart the development of tumor-suppressing microRNAs under conditions of hypoxia, an international team led by scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center discovered. The results were reported in an early online...
An analysis of a large pooled data set from the Pooling Project of Prospective Studies of Diet and Cancer reported by Seungyoun Jung, ScD, Channing Division of Network Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, and colleagues in Journal of the National Cancer...
A retrospective analysis of a large surgical database has documented that bilateral mastectomy is associated with a doubling in complication rates, compared with unilateral mastectomy. Researchers reported the findings at the 14th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Breast Surgeons in...
The ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) Score, a multigene expression assay, quantifies the risk of local recurrence and invasive local recurrence for women with DCIS treated with surgical excision, researchers reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. “The DCIS Score can aid clinical...
Long-term follow-up of Cancer and Leukemia Group B (CALGB) 9343 “confirms and extends the earlier report that in women age ≥ 70 years with clinical stage I, [estrogen receptor (ER)]-positive breast cancer treated with lumpectomy followed by tamoxifen, irradiation adds no significant benefit in...
Chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy events resulted in limiting the dosing of chemotherapy in a significant proportion of women with nonmetastatic breast cancer being treated with paclitaxel, and those who had their dose reduced or discontinued received significantly less cumulative drug,...
Angelina Jolie, in a New York Times article entitled “My Medical Choice,”1 disclosed that having a BRCA1 mutation and an estimated 87% risk of breast cancer, “I decided to be proactive and minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy.” She was writing...
Available data suggest that DNA methylation in blood is a potential epigenetic marker of cancer risk, but this has not been evaluated on a genome-wide scale in prospective studies of breast cancer. Xu and colleagues measured DNA methylation at 27,578 CpG sites (ie, DNA regions where cytosine and...
Radiotherapy to the axilla may replace axillary lymph node dissection for local tumor control in selected patients with sentinel node–positive breast cancer, sparing many patients lymphedema, according to the final results of the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC)...
The FDA recently approved the MemoryShape Breast Implant for breast augmentation in women at least 22 years old and for breast reconstruction in women of any age. The MemoryShape Breast Implants are manufactured by Mentor Worldwide LLC. The FDA’s approval is based on 6 years of data from 955 women...
The landmark aTTom study showed that 10 years of adjuvant tamoxifen is superior to 5 years of tamoxifen in reducing the risk of breast cancer recurrence or death but that the full survival benefits of extended treatment do not emerge until after the 10 years of treatment. These findings, which were ...
About one in five patients who had completed primary breast cancer treatments but had not started endocrine therapy “had elevated memory and/or executive function complaints that were statistically significantly associated with domain-specific” neuropsychological test performances and depressive...
Overall survival benefits of six management strategies for ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) are within 1 year of each other, according to a disease simulation model integrating empirical data from published literature and quantifying the tradeoffs among the different management strategies with...
Radium-223 dichloride (Xofigo) is an alpha particle–emitting radiotherapeutic drug that mimics calcium and localizes to areas of high bone turnover, providing targeted therapy for skeletal metastasis. The drug was recently approved for treatment of patients with castration-resistant prostate...
PTEN is a negative regulator of PI3K/AKT signaling. PI3K/AKT signaling can be activated by HER2, and it has been hypothesized that alteration in this pathway may affect sensitivity to trastuzumab (Herceptin). Preclinical data and some of the limited available clinical data suggest that loss or...
Management of metastatic breast cancer requires monitoring of tumor burden to assess response to treatment, and there is a need for biomarkers that can measure tumor burden with high sensitivity and specificity. Assays measuring serum cancer antigen (CA) 15-3 and circulating tumor cells have been...
As a cancer care specialist, it can be easy to become hyperfocused on your area of expertise within your subspecialty. But that’s exactly what ASCO wants its members—in all specialties—to avoid. The theme of this year’s Breast Cancer Symposium—Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Clinical...
One-quarter of women who should take hormone-blocking therapies as part of their breast cancer treatment either do not start or do not complete the 5-year course, according to a new study led by University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers. For many women with hormone...
As a neoadjuvant regimen for HER2-positive early breast cancer, the use of two HER2-directed agents was no more effective than trastuzumab (Herceptin) alone in producing pathologic complete responses, although one subset of patients did benefit from this approach, according to the results of the...
The search for a biomarker of benefit from mTOR inhibitors in breast cancer fell flat in an exploratory genetic analysis of the BOLERO-2 trial, presented at the 2013 ASCO Annual Meeting by Gabriel N. Hortobagyi, MD, FACP, Professor of Breast Medical Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson...
This is the first time I’m going public with the fact that I have advanced ovarian cancer. I thought I could avoid the fate of my mother and her mother, both of whom died of ovarian cancer in their 50s, and live well past my 60s and even 70s. But at 58, I’ve had to accept that that is not likely. I ...
Two studies published in Journal of Clinical Oncology indicate that treatment-related symptoms and mammographic density reduction may predict whether a woman with hormone receptor–positive breast cancer will benefit from adjuvant endocrine therapy. In one study, women who had specific adverse...
I am a retired oncologist, previously an attending physician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, with a professional lifetime experience in caring for patients with all stages of breast cancer, and now I am a regular reader of The ASCO Post. In recent months there have been several articles...
Two drugs were recently given Priority Review designation by FDA. Obinutuzumab (GA101) was granted Priority Review for the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, based on final stage 1 data from the pivotal CLL11 trial. The FDA confirmed the action date is December 20, 2013. FDA also granted...
Attendees at the ASCO Annual Meeting are faced with a major challenge of trying to attend as many important sessions as they can over a 4-day period. Our challenge is to feature the major news in The ASCO Post. In addition to our regular comprehensive coverage of key presentations, the following...
ASCO has completed the first phase in developing several sets of interoperability standards for cancer care data and overcoming the widespread inconsistencies that currently limit secure sharing of information between providers, patients, and researchers. The first standard, the Breast Cancer...
The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) recently issued a newly updated clinical practice guideline on pharmacologic prevention interventions for premenopausal and postmenopausal women who are at increased risk for breast cancer. Compared to the previous version of the guideline, this...
Internationally known for her research in the molecular genetics of cancer, Olufunmilayo I. Olopade, MD, FACP, first became interested in oncology during medical school in Nigeria, where she cared for patients with Burkitt’s lymphoma. After moving to Chicago in 1983 to continue her medical...
In the treatment of early breast cancer, outcomes are equivalent whether paclitaxel is delivered weekly or every 2 weeks, though the weekly schedule may be better tolerated, according to the results of a phase III trial presented at the 2013 ASCO Annual Meeting.1 “The progression-free survival...
Long-term follow-up of Cancer and Leukemia Group B (CALGB) trial 9343 confirmed and extended 5-year results that in women age ≥ 70 years with clinical stage I, estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer treated with lumpectomy followed by tamoxifen, “irradiation adds no significant benefit in...
Adding cetuximab (Erbitux) to cisplatin doubled the overall response rate and appeared to prolong progression-free and overall survival in a randomized phase II study among patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. Although the trial did not meet its primary endpoint of overall...
Results from an international collaborative study showed that women with primary breast cancer diagnosed during pregnancy had overall survival similar to nonpregnant patients. Reporting their findings in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the authors concluded: “This information is important when...
The addition of tomosynthesis to standard digital mammography resulted in a 30% reduction in overall recall rates among women being screened for breast cancer, according to a new study published online in Radiology.1 The results demonstrate that digital tomosynthesis is an effective tool in...
Direct your patients to www.cancer.net/whattoknow so they can learn about ASCO’s recent guideline on drugs to risk of breast cancer for women who have a high risk of developing the disease, including what the recommendations mean for patients and a list of questions to ask the doctor. In addition,...
Breast cancer arising in younger women has increasingly become the subject of intense study, and often debate, over the past decade. Retrospective studies have illustrated that breast cancer in young women is more commonly an aggressive subtype (ie, triple-negative/basal-like, HER2-enriched),...
Available data suggest that younger age is an independent risk factor for disease recurrence and death in women with breast cancer. However, there has not been adequate study of the interaction of age with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) status or anti-HER2 treatment. In an analysis ...
The overuse of imaging in oncology workup and surveillance is a timely concern, as health-care dollars shrink and the risk for second malignancies becomes clearer. At this year’s ASCO Annual Meeting, several studies showed that although many routine imaging studies may be unnecessary, physicians...
In patients with triple-negative breast cancer, the addition of carboplatin significantly improved the rate of pathologic complete response after neoadjuvant chemotherapy in a study by the German Breast Group (GBG)/Gynecologic Oncology Working Group–Breast (AGO-B) reported at the 2013 ASCO Annual...
Long-term use of a calcium channel blocker to treat hypertension is associated with higher breast cancer risk, according to a report published online by JAMA Internal Medicine. Researchers evaluated associations between various classes of hypertensives, the most commonly prescribed class of...
Patients with breast tumors in which breast cancer stem and progenitor cells have a genetic abnormality of the PI3K/Akt signaling pathway are more likely to have lymph node metastases, according to a study in JAMA Surgery. “These oncogenic defects may be missed by gross molecular testing of the...
Direct your patients to www.cancer.net/breastsymposium to read patient-friendly summaries that explain the research highlighted at the 2013 Breast Cancer Symposium and provide a list of questions to ask their doctors and additional resources to learn more. Also, your patients can listen to a...
Antiangiogenic strategies using the anti–vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) monoclonal antibody bevacizumab (Avastin) gained traction in breast cancer with the publication of the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) 2100 trial in 2007. That study demonstrated a progression-free survival ...
In a study (BEATRICE trial) reported in Lancet Oncology, David Cameron, MD, Professor of Oncology and Director of Cancer Services, NHS Lothian at the University of Edinburgh, and colleagues evaluated the strategy of adding the antiangiogenic agent bevacizumab (Avastin) to adjuvant chemotherapy in...
Susan G. Komen for the Cure recently announced it has awarded grant funding of more than $1.4 million to five researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine and a one-of-a-kind tissue bank. The grants will be part of the $42 million Komen will award in 2013 for cancer research. Grants Focus...
In analyses of pooled information from cohorts of women with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations who have had a prior breast cancer diagnosis, Phillips and colleagues examined the association between tamoxifen use compared to nonuse on contralateral breast cancer risk.1 Tamoxifen use was associated with...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Kelly-Anne Phillips, MBBS, MD, of the University of Melbourne, and colleagues analyzed the association of adjuvant tamoxifen use and risk of contralateral breast cancer among women carrying BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations in the International BRCA1 ...