Jul 09
31
Surgeon Travels to Find Answers to Agressive Breast Cancer
When an African American female surgeon noticed that she kept seeing a trend of young black women come into the clinic where she worked that already had advanced cases of invasive breast cancer, she knew that there had to be answers and help, she just had to know where to start, and why these younger black women were so much more statistically susceptible to advanced breast cancer, or what’s called “triple negative breast cancer”.
So, what’d this surgeon do? Well, she’s recently packed her bags and is going to Ghana to help figure out the common thread and perhaps help to treat and even eventually cure this agressive form of breast cancer that hits the black community so much harder than any other ethnic background.
Why is it called triple negative breast cancer? Well, there are three genetic markers that can help oncologists determine how best to treat the breast cancer by telling them what genes need to be targeted. This greatly helps in successfully treating all kinds of breast cancer. However, what makes triple negative breast cancer so hard to treat is that, like it’s name, it does not show any one of these three genetic markers to target, therefore it is much more difficult to treat since the markers that need to be targeted are not there.
The reason the oncologist specailizing surgeon chose Ghana is a good one. Apparently, about 60% of the breast cancer cases reported in Ghana are of the triple negative sort, so it’s the perfect place to have plenty of subjects to study. Here in the US, it only accounts for a total of about 15% of cases, but keep in mind, that’s also with a much larger melting pot of ethinicities being treated, so it doesn’t really adequately reflect the ethnic background tendencies of the disease.
While it is of course terrible to see so many advanced cases of suffering in Ghana, the country offers great avenues for research since the pool is large for patients to study and put in clinical trials if necessary. Hopefully they can gain some insight from this cross country study and bring it over here into other breast cancer cases as well.
