Smart Woman: Gene Test Finds Which Breast Cancer Patients Can Skip Chemo

However, these studies involved fewer patients than the current study, which enrolled 10,253 women with a certain kind of breast cancer known as hormone-receptor positive, HER2 negative cancer.

Researchers have found that many women diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer may be able to forgo adding chemotherapy to a regimen of hormone-blocking meds, without hurting their chances of beating the dreaded disease thanks to gene testing. Researchers said that most of doctors know that there is no need of chemo to women with early stage breast cancer not spread to lymph nodes.

The test accurately identified a group of women whose cancers are so likely to respond to hormone therapy that adding chemo would do little if any good.

“These patients who had low risk scores by Oncotype did extraordinarily well at five years”, said Dr. Hope Rugo, a breast cancer specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, with no role in the study.

“We need to be really on top of new technology so we’re using our health care dollars wisely and not spending dollars where we don’t see a benefit”, Lehman said.

Past research has also found that the gene test could be used as a guide when having to choose between chemo and other treatments, but researchers were anxious that the test may be inaccurate and risky to a few patients. At the end of the study, less than two percent of the hormone-only group had the cancer spread and the survival rate was 98 percent overall.

The most common cancers diagnosed in the mothers in the study were breast and blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma. The experiment was funded by the National Cancer Institute.

During the study, women whose tumours scored 10 or lower on the 21-gene test received standard hormone therapy such as tamoxifen but were not subjected to chemotherapy.

They did not receive treatment during the first 12 to 14 weeks of their pregnancy, when the researchers said the risk of birth defects is greatest. The findings provide the highest level of evidence supporting expert-derived clinical practice guidelines which have recommended Oncotype DX in patients with early stage ER-positive breast cancer. It may be the difference between recovering or not for a few cancer patients, but others do not reap any benefits from the aggressive radiation.

“It’s important that the test was validated, but also how low the risk of recurrence actually was for this subset of patients”, she says.

In the editorial accompanying the study in the publication, Dr. Clifford Hudis mentions one big obstacle, which is the raised cost of the test. Even though insurers like Medicare cover it, the test is about $4,000; patients whose tumors score between 11 and 25 are automatically covered.