Tag: breast cancer awareness

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The Conspiracy of Hope

Renée Pellerin is a former CBC health journalist and the author of Conspiracy of Hope, The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening, published by Goose Lane Editions. Below is an except from her article in the Globe and Mail responding to the new  guidelines published by the Canadian Task Force on Preventative Health Care for breast cancer screening.

“Every woman over 40 should be aware of new Canadian breast screening guidelines. Every family physician should be prepared to discuss those guidelines with their patients. Every provincial breast screening program should take a good, hard look at what it is telling women.

One of the main harms of screening is false positive results, which can lead to unnecessary further tests including biopsies and the anxiety resulting from being labelled as having cancer. The task force analysis is that false positive results occur in between 20 and 30 per cent of all women screened over seven years.

The other main harm is over-diagnosis, not to be confused with a false positive. It’s when a mammogram detects real cancer, but it’s one that does not grow, one that a woman will never feel, will never cause a problem. There is no way to know which screen-detected lesion will behave this way, thus it is always involves surgery and possible additional treatment.

A Canadian screening trial estimated that up to 50 per cent of screen-detected breast cancers in women under 50 were over diagnosed. The number of cases in older women were fewer, but still high. So while screening may discover early cancers that are more easily treated, it may also discover cancers that may be treated unnecessarily.

Yet, how many women and their doctors understand that the benefits of screening are limited, while the risk of over-diagnosis resulting in over treatment is significant?”

Here is the link to the full text from the Globe and Mail on December 11, 2018.
Here is the link to the book Conspiracy of Hope.

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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.

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What do Dogs and BreastDefense have in Common?

Some biologists think that a target of 99% accuracy for any cancer screen is unattainable.

It seems that SignPost is not alone in this pursuit.

According to a company called BioScent Dx, dogs are able to smell minute changes in a human bio-markers including hormones, proteins and other organic compounds. This has lead to dogs being trained to aid in the monitoring of conditions such as diabetes, narcolepsy and cancer. BioScent Dx is working on developing a cancer screen for recurrent breast cancer.

Studies have shown that, when trained, dogs can detect cancer from human breath, fecal, and urine samples with up to 99% accuracy.

BreastDefense has determined through initial work that 99% accuracy of breast cancer is attainable.