Jul 9, 2008 5:50 pm US/Eastern
Younger Age, Faster Breast Cancer Growth
The Study May Help Improve Cancer Therapies, Sparing Women The Effects Of More Aggressive Treatments.
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
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Computerized mammography
CBS News
Younger women with breast cancer tend to have a more aggressive form of the disease than older women, according to a recently released American report.
An American team examined 80 tumours from women in five countries from women in three age groups.
They found genes were active in the cancers from women under the age of 45 that are not active in tumours from older women. The genes do not respond well to treatment and tumors are more likely to return. Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy in North Carolina carried out the research which is published in the
Journal of Clinical Oncology. Dr. Kimberly Blackwell, a breast oncologist at Duke and senior investigator on the study, said: "Clinicians have long noted that the breast cancers we see in women under the age of 45 tend to respond less well to treatment and have higher recurrence rates than the disease we see in older women, particularly those over the age of 65.
"Now we're really understanding why this is the case, and by understanding this, we may be able to develop better and more targeted therapies to treat these younger women.
"Identifying these distinguishing characteristics may be the first step in developing more effective treatments for these younger patients."
Other research has shown that women with a specific form of breast cancer are 11 times more likely to die from the disease within five years than other forms of cancer.
Even though the tumors were less than 2cm in size, which normally means they are low risk, if they are HER2 positive, they are extremely deadly.
One in three cancers test positive for a protein called HER2 and respond to the drug Herceptin.
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