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Young Women with Breast Cancer – The Forgotten Generation?

Are young women a forgotten generation when it comes to breast cancer?  Thousands of young women are diagnosed every year. They often face the most aggressive cancers.

One young Canadian women, profiled in Rachel Ray Everyday shared her story.  Judit Saunders was 26 years old and working as a registered nurse at a major children’s hospital in Calgary when she discovered a lump. She was diagnosed with hormonally driven HER2 positive breast cancer. She went through all the standard care treatments. Two and a half years later , it came back as stage four breast cancer. Now, she is in treatment for life, but she hasn’t let the disease stop her from living.

BreastDefense could make the ongoing monitoring of cancer easier.

When cancer is diagnosed in a young person it is a very different experience than when diagnosed mid to late life. “In the young adult years, you’re really laying the foundation for the rest of your life. Finishing school, starting careers, starting a family” says Geoff Eaton, Young Adult Cancer Canada (YACC) executive director and two time cancer survivor.

Young Adult Cancer Canada has teamed up with Memorial University to conduct a study that hopes to shed more light on the challenges of young adults with cancer.  “we’re spending more money on people who are kind of past the majority of their life and ignoring the people who have most of their life still to live” says MUN’s Dr. Shelia Garland. The Prime Study – named since it is examining people who are diagnosed with cancer in the prime of their lives – has seen 500 young adult cancer survivors weigh in with their own experiences.. The aim is to explore the physical, social and emotional challenges facing young adults with cancer.

The majority of breast cancers – 51% , are women between the ages of 50 and 69. But there are still many many women under the age of 40 – (over a 1000 new cases a year in Canada),  that get the news from their doctor that they have breast cancer.

BreastDefense is a simple test that could benefit breast cancer survivors in monitoring remission.

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From Bench to Bedside – BreastDefense and Translational Medicine

Translational research is generally considered a process that starts in the lab—the “bench”—where a new drug, device, or procedure is developed, and ends with the production that makes it available in the clinic—the “bedside.”

Barry S. Coller from the Rockefeller University, NY defines translational medicine as: “The application of the scientific method to address a health need.”

He holds that, in contrast to basic research, which has the generation of new knowledge as its primary goal, the primary goal of translational science is improvement in human health.

BreastDefense is very close to the “bedside”. The BreastDefense tissue test could be made available to women within a year and the blood test just 24 months later.

“We know more about the human body today than we did yesterday, and tomorrow we’ll know even more—a lot more. In the last two decades, advances in human genome sequencing, molecular imaging, and other areas have sparked a research revolution that reveals ever more detailed and precise information about how our bodies work. Every day brings new discoveries, many of which may hold the potential to improve human health in meaningful ways.

But the pace at which those discov­eries lead to improved health has been frustratingly slow. Yes, new drugs and new therapies do reach patients, and when they do, they often make a tre­mendous difference. But relative to the number of research projects conducted, papers published, and trials run, it is clear that new health care advances have lagged behind the vast amounts of data generated by the explosion in biomedical discovery.

If you look at drug development, the failure rate is over 95 percent,” he says. “So an enormous amount of money is being spent nationwide on things that don’t work.”

This except was taken from Duke Medical Alumni News.

BreastDefense is a simple test that we are confident will work and will quickly have a huge impact on breast cancer survivor rates.

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Many Women Could Be Spared Chemotherapy

 

The largest precision medicine study ever done was presented at a plenary session at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago. Researchers looked at more than 10,000 women aged 18-75.

Researchers were looking at  whether the standard of care of chemotherapy and endocrine therapy benefit all women with the HER-2  breast cancer.

The test assigned women to a score of 0-100 based on the likelihood that cancer would return within 10 years. The study’s aim was to assess the majority of women in the middle range of 11-25 to see if there was a benefit from chemotherapy.

The results concluded that, depending on a patients age, women who received only endocrine therapy did not fare worse than those who were also treated with chemotherapy.

“practically speaking, this means that thousands of women will be able to avoid chemotherapy with all its side effects, while still achieving excellent long term outcomes” said Dr. Harold Burstein, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.

The abstract from the New England Journal of Medicine can be found here.