Jun 08
30
Triple Negative Breast Cancer Rare, Hard to Treat
There is a breast cancer that I wasn’t even aware existed, that is called a Triple Negative breast cancer, that is apparently and thankfully a rare form of the potentially deadly disease, but is also very hard to treat and deadly. This invasive form of breast cancer only affects about 15 out of one hundred invasive breast cancer patients, but is very hard to find the right treatment for and is fairly resistent to otherwise successful breast cancer treatments (depending on the advancement of the disease of course).
There is another catch to triple negative breast cancer. It also primarily affects african american women, usually younger than the usual demographic population that gets breast cancer. Here’s what makes triple negative breast cancer different and harder to treat than normal breast cancer.Â
Women with triple negative do not have receptor sites for the three main hormones that fuel breast cancer, therefore a therapy that is often successful at treating normal breast cancer, which uses hormones, cannot be used in triple negative treatment because they lack those receptor sites to begin with and it would not be responsive to hormone therapy.Â
Therefore, these patients can only use chemotherapy, which narrows down the treatment options greatly and also narrows down the odds that this one trick pony approach to treating it will actually work to put the breast cancer in permanent remission.Â
Also, triple negative breast cancers tend to come out of remission fairly often, after a patient thinks they are out of the woods so to speak. What makes this form especially heartbreaking is that it affects women in the prime of their life, and is so very hard to treat, making the odds go down that they will be able to live a healthy and happy life for the rest of what should be their naturally prosperous years. Â
