Blood Tests Might Help Guide Breast Cancer Care

June 6th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

TUESDAY, June 5 (HealthDay News) — A simple blood test may help
gauge prognosis and tailor treatments for women who have been diagnosed
with early stage breast cancer.

The test, described in the June 6 online edition of The Lancet
Oncology, measures how many tumor cells are circulating in the blood.
In the new study, if even one cell was detected in the bloodstream, a
woman had a greater chance of her cancer recurring and of dying.

“This may help with prognosis and staging of the cancer and, in the
future, with targets for breast cancer treatments,” said study lead author
Dr. Anthony Lucci, a professor of surgery at the University of Texas MD
Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston.

Commenting on the findings, Dr. Stephanie Bernik, chief of surgical
oncology at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said, “We are moving
into a state where we’re looking at a person’s individual tumor and this
is another way to do that, potentially leading to treatment.”

Whether or not cancer has spread to the lymph nodes is currently the
best way to predict survival in women with breast cancer. Even so, a
substantial number of patients whose cancer has not spread to the lymph
nodes will have a recurrence while some of those who do have lymph-node
involvement won’t relapse.

Blood tests similar to the one investigated in this study have been
found to be useful to gauge how well patients who already have metastatic
cancer will do.

For this study, researchers counted circulating tumor cells in 302
breast cancer patients who were about to undergo surgery but who hadn’t
yet received chemotherapy.

Circulating tumor cells were detectable in about one-quarter of the
participants, the investigators found. Fifteen percent of these
individuals had a relapse and 10 percent died during a five-year
follow-up, compared with 3 percent and 2 percent, respectively, of
patients who did not have circulating tumor cells.

The more tumor cells a woman had in her bloodstream, the higher the
likelihood of relapsing or dying, according to the report.

Although the test may not be far off in terms of clinical practice, “we
need additional studies,” Lucci said.

One area for study is how well these circulating cells predict
recurrence and death in patients who have already had chemotherapy.

Currently, the American Society of Clinical Oncology does not recommend
that clinicians measure circulating tumor cells in patients.

And in an accompanying comment article, Justin Stebbing, a professor in
the department of surgery and cancer at Imperial College in London, said
that “despite increasing evidence supporting the use of [circulating tumor
cells] as biomarkers, how this information can be integrated into present
practice is uncertain.”

According to Bernik, though, “it makes sense that women who have
circulating tumor cells would potentially be at higher risk of distant
disease at some later date.”

The problem is that just having circulating tumor cells may not be
enough information to foretell the future, she noted.

“The cells also need to have a propensity to grow elsewhere,” she said.
“Not every cancer cell becomes a metastatic cancer cell. Hopefully,
gaining the ability to tell which cells are more likely to spread
potentially could guide therapy,” Bernik added.

According to Lucci, circulating tumor cells are also showing promise in
predicting melanoma prognosis, so the method may be “effective in several
different tumor systems.”

More information

The U.S. National Cancer Institute has more on breast cancer.