I read this in USA Today. As posted earlier in the week. Post cancer patients want to know, "is it still gone?"

Positive News on Breast Cancer

Posted on: Wednesday, 13 August 2008, 06:00 CDT

By Liz Szabo

Women who survive five years after being diagnosed with breast cancer have a good chance of remaining cancer-free, a new study shows.

In the most detailed study of its kind, the report shows that 89% of such patients remain disease-free 10 years after diagnosis, and 81% are cancer-free after 15 years.

Authors of the study, published online Tuesday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, say their findings may reassure breast cancer survivors, many of whom assume their odds are much bleaker.

"Patients often ask me, 'Now that I've survived my breast cancer, what is my future risk of a recurrence?'" says author Abenaa Brewster, an assistant professor at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "This is an answer we've had a hard time giving. They remain really terrified about their risk."

Brewster notes that her study didn't include women who relapsed before five years.

Overall, 89% of breast cancer patients live at least five years, the American Cancer Society says. About 183,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year, and about 40,000 die of it.

In Brewster's study, all 2,838 patients had surgery to remove the original tumor, and some also had radiation. All women also took medication -- such as several months of chemotherapy, five years of the pill tamoxifen or both -- to prevent cancer from returning.

Thanks to new drugs, women today may fare better than those in the study, who were treated between 1985 and 2001, says the cancer society's Len Lichtenfeld. Doctors now often prescribe aromatase inhibitors to post-menopausal women when they're diagnosed, Brewster says.

Lichtenfeld says some of the study's findings were surprising.

In the first five years, two types of tumors are less likely to relapse: those that are slow-growing and those whose growth is fueled by estrogen. Doctors don't yet fully understand how estrogen affects breast cancer or why, in the study, the two types of tumors recurred more often 10 to 15 years after diagnosis.

It's possible that women whose tumors seemed less threatening were "undertreated" and could have benefited from additional therapy, says Joseph Baar, a breast cancer specialist at the Ireland Cancer Center in Cleveland. Baar notes that doctors have begun a large study to learn which women need the most intensive therapy and which might safely avoid the rigors of chemotherapy. (c) Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

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Source: USA TODAY

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