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dcarpenter
dcarpenter Member Posts: 36
edited June 2014 in IDC (Invasive Ductal Carcinoma)

Maybe we are being over treated for Early Stage Breast Cancers- minimal-risk cancers - but how do we know which are agressive or not?

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  • otter
    otter Member Posts: 6,099
    edited October 2009

    dcarpenter, one way to estimate the "aggressiveness" of someone's BC is to run an Oncotype DX test on the tumor tissue.  That test checks to see whether the cells in the tumor are expressing certain genes that are associated with "aggressiveness" and rapid growth.  The test also checks for expression of genes associated with lack of aggressiveness (slow growth).  The result (the Oncotype DX recurrence score) is a composite based on the amount of expression of 16 different growth-related genes. 

    The recurrence score can be plotted on a standard curve (a graph) to find out the likelihood that the patient with that tumor will develop a "distant recurrence" (metastatic cancer) in the next 10 years.  The estimates provided by the Oncotype DX recurrence score assume the patient has taken tamoxifen for 5 years (the first 5 years of the 10-year risk interval).

    I see from another post that your tumor was tested with the Oncotype DX test, so you probably already knew all that.  Anyway, testing for cellular traits that are associated with malignant-type growth (or not) is one way to predict which tumors are likely to be aggressive and which are not.

    otter 

    [Edited:  One problem with the Oncotype DX test is that it requires a pretty large chunk of tissue (slides).  It can't be done on a small biopsy sample.  So, tests like the Oncotype DX test won't solve all the problems with "over-treatment".] 

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  • bluedasher
    bluedasher Member Posts: 1,203
    edited October 2009

    I looked at the videos and article on this on the ABC.com website. They are pretty similar to some other recent articles and I felt they weren't well researched or accurate. The ABC chief medical editor and others would say that what we really need is tools to tell which cancers are aggressive. They made it sound like that isn't being done already. We have testing for HER2 and hormone receptors. And as Otter points out there is Oncotype Dx. There is the TAILORx clinical trial which is testing how much benefit there is or is not from chemo with an intermediate Oncotype score.

    I've seen an article about another tumor gene analysis though I don't recall the name.

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  • dcarpenter
    dcarpenter Member Posts: 36
    edited October 2009

    thanks for the replies- I am new to posting here, so cool! 

     I feel good about all my treatments and the future - just that darn score of 36 on the oncotype. FYI the Cancer Math analysis you can do on-line, they are updating soon, to add the oncotype score you can put in..thanks again.

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