Mar 09
2
New Test for Treating Breast Cancer
We get to talk about so many new developments in breast cancer, breast cancer prevention and different ways to go about treating different strains of the potentially deadly disease. Well, there’s another diagnosing-type treatment that may help oncologists to determine the different “personalities” of breast cancer, and tailor the treatment to the tumors that way instead of a one size fits all approach, which we all know unfortunately hasn’t been the best way to go about it thus far.
They actually extract the nucleus of the cancer cells instead of just staining the breast cancer cells, so that they can more so study that actual components of the cancer cells in that particular patient instead of doing the more general diagnosis, testing and treatment that just kind of catches all instead of tailoring. The extraction identifies over 50 different characteristics of the cancer cells themselves, which means they can predict with 97% accuracy what patients will respond to standard types of treatments like chemotherapy.
It is even said that they may be able to better identify women in the subset of breast cancer patients that benefit from no real treatment at all, other than the traditional lumpectomy which is minimal down time and does not interfere with the health and physiology of the body like chemo, radiation and other damaging treatments. Â The doctor who was talking about this new method of figuring out the specifics of the actual breast cancer cells as they differ from woman to woman, sounded very confident and excited about this new method, which got me excited at the prospects.
