Moderators: help please

stephincanada

Hi Mods,

I found this article on your website, and want to know which study is behind the article summary: http://www.breastcancer.org/research-news/20090710

Your article summary is called:

Women Treated for Hormone-Receptor-Negative Cancers More Likely to Be Diagnosed With New Cancer in Other Breast

I did a search on www.pubmed.organd couldn't find it. I need it to help me to decide whether to proceed with a mastectomy, or just limit my treatment to lumpectomy and radiation.

Thank you!

Stephanie

BarredOwl

Hi stephincanada:

I think that may be a summary of this article, which appears to be more pertinent to the question of contralateral prophylactic mastectomy ("CPM") than to your question about lumpectomy versus mastectomy.

Kurian (2009): http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/101/15/1058.full

There is PDF version available at that link (upper right), plus links to some articles citing this one (at bottom).

If you are considering CPM, please keep in mind that a certain level of increased risk may sound like a lot, but the actual risk depends on individual baseline risk. In other words, if something increases risk of contralateral breast cancer by 3-fold, but the baseline annual risk is relatively small, the risk increase will be commensurately small (3 times a small number is a small number). Your treatment team should be able to provide you with case-specific guidance about ipsilateral (same) recurrence risk and contralateral (opposite) risk.

Please be sure to discuss any publication that influences your thinking with your treatment team, to ensure accurate understanding, possible limitations, and applicability to your case.

Discussion of such publications with your team is also necessary to ensure currency of the information, because there may be additional and/or conflicting studies that alter understanding, or other studies that may be more pertinent to your situation (e.g., depending on family history, heritable mutation (e.g., BRCA)). For example, the following article is listed on the full-text page above, and its findings do not appear to be entirely consistent with those of Kurian (2009). There may be other relevant studies available.

Bessonova (2011): http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/20/2/389.full

Bessonova PDF version: http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/cebp/20/2/389.full.pdf

BarredOwl

stephincanada

thank you, barred owl!!! What would we do without you and your amazing knowledge??? So helpful as always.

With much gratitude,

Stephanie