Gene test can help with early stage breast cancer

The study involved an early-stage breast cancer that hasn’t yet spread to the lymph nodes and is responsive to the hormones estrogen and progesterone. However an unbelievable finding on cancer healing research has confirmed that hormone based antitumor drugs can perform tremendously well as an alternative of Chemotherapy in particular cases of cancer. Each year, more than 100,000 women in the United States are diagnosed with this. Not only were the trial subjects who skipped the chemo based on test results able to avoid other health risks often caused by the chemical cocktails, they also had less than 1% chance of their cancer popping up in other organs such as their liver and/or lungs 5-years after treatment.

“The compelling results seen in this global study provide unequivocal evidence supporting the clinical utility of Oncotype DX to risk-stratify patients with early-stage breast cancer, and indicate that the findings are generalizable to everyday clinical practice”, Dr. Sparano said.

The key to identifying which women might fall in that category is a genetic test known as Oncotype DX, which analyzes 21 genes in a breast cancer tumor to asses how aggressive it might or might not be, researchers are reporting in the New England Journal of Medicine.

An independent expert, Dr. Clifford Hudis of New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, agreed.

“The test gives us an idea as to the chance of cancer coming back; it also helps us in determining the benefit from chemotherapy”, Dr. Nagpal said.

“Low score, they don’t need it. High score, those patients have a three times higher risk of cancer occurrence than ones with a low score”, Shinwari says. “I think it’s a great opportunity for women that are suffering this unfortunate disease that’s taken many lives”, Judy Orloff of Holyoke said. In other words, going forward, a subset of women will not undergo the most grueling part of breast cancer treatment.

Frederic Amant, a professor and gynecological oncologist at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium and lead author of the study told the Guardian: “Our results show that fear of cancer treatment is no reason to terminate a pregnancy, that maternal treatment should not be delayed and that chemotherapy can be given”. Previous studies had found that a low score suggested chemotherapy did not add any survival benefit to tamoxifen treatment.

“The future is bright” for gene tests to more precisely guide treatment, he said.

Among the children whose mothers were diagnosed with cancer during pregnancy, 69 percent were exposed to chemotherapy before birth, about 3 percent to radiation therapy and 5.4 percent to both chemotherapy and radiation.

‘Even though they did not get chemotherapy this large group of women did very well.