Triple negative breast cancer

lydiabest54

Do doctors keep breast cancer specimen after the tumor has been removed from the breast after surgery?  I ask this question because I read online that doctors did not come up with the name Triple Negative until 2006, and that prior to 2006, doctors were not testing for her2 status; they were only testing for er\pr status.  If that was the case, how do women know for a fact they had triple negative breast cancer 10 and 15 years ago if doctors were not testing for her2 status then? Do doctors go back and retest the tumor over again to see?  I really hope you all can understand what I am trying to ask here. I really appreciate your responses.

MelissaDallas

herceptin became available in 1998.

lydiabest54

@MelissaDallas, I don't even get what you're trying to say. You should have made yourself clearer

MelissaDallas

it had to be earlier than 2006 because it was approved for use in women with metastatic  herceptin positive breast cancer in 1998.  They started using it in women with early stage a little later. Here is the development timeline.

http://www.gene.com/media/product-information/herceptin-development-timeline

lydiabest54

Yeah in women with hormonal positive breast cancer but not triple negative.  I never heard of women with triple negative taking herceptin

MelissaDallas

but they wouldn't have started testing for it to know they were negative until they started testing to see if they were positive. Does that make sense?

Beesie

Most women with invasive breast cancer (not DCIS) have been tested for HER2 status since the early 2000s. So even though the term "triple negative" was not in use at that time, women diagnosed during the early 2000s would know their ER, PR and HER2 status and would have been able to slot themselves into the "triple negative" category once the term came into use in the mid-2000s..  On the other hand, anyone diagnosed prior to 1998 probably would not know if they were "triple negative" or not. 

"From 1998 to 2000, the percent of patients who underwent HER2 evaluation increased from 12 to 94%; % of women with ductal carcinoma in situ, for whom HER2 testing is not recommended, were tested." HER2 Evaluation and Its Impact on Breast Cancer Treatment Decisions

And from BC.org:

When was triple-negative identified?   Last modified on September 17, 2012 at 6:56 pm

Question from
Skippy123:
When did the cancer community begin to identify triple-negatives?
How long have we been tracking triple-negative survivors?

Answers -
George Sledge, M.D.
When we say triple-negative, we mean estrogen-receptor negative,
progesterone-receptor negative, and HER2 negative. Routine HER2 testing
did not become possible until a decade ago. Interestingly, if one looks
in the medical literature, one never sees the term triple-negative
breast cancer prior to 3-4 years ago. Indeed, focused studies for
triple-negative breast cancer have almost entirely been conducted within
the last 3-4 years. That is not to say that we don't know a great deal
about triple-negative breast cancers. Because clinical researchers
collect slides and tissue blocks as part of clinical trials, we are able
to go back to those blocks and slides, sometimes from decades ago, and
look at clinical trials through the lens of triple-negative breast
cancers.

Beth Baughman DuPree, M.D., F.A.C.S.
The term triple-negative seemed to become quite popular,
particularly in distinguishing patients as a subgroup once the drug
Herceptin became available to treat patients that were HER2/neu positive
and previously thought to be a subgroup of having an incredibly
aggressive form of cancer. Once there was a treatment for HER2/neu, the
term triple-negative became more used in distinguishing this group from a
subset of breast cancer patients.  When was triple-negative identified?

lydiabest54

Thanks Beesie for explaining this in detail to me. Can I ask, is it rare for triple negative breast cancer to recur after 5 years? Some oncologists say recurrence is rare after 5 years and others say it is not. I don't know what to believe.

placid44

Yes, I've been told that TNBC recurrence after 5 years is rare and after 7 years almost unheard of.