Breast Cancer

Customized more aggressive treatments should be given to patients with the worst prognosis. For most of the other breast patients, shorter and often milder treatment is also a humble victory in our daily struggle against cancer.

Without question, targeted therapies have revolutionized the treatment of cancer across histologies.

This review will focus on newer FDA-approved targeted therapies associated with type II chemotherapy-related cardiac dysfunction, or generally reversible cardiotoxicity, and will provide the latest information on the incidence and clinical spectrum of cardiotoxicity associated with each therapy, modifiable risk factors where known, and the mechanisms of cardiotoxicity.

In this review we discuss the rationale and underlying radiobiologic concepts for hypofractionation, and review the clinical trials and ASTRO guidelines supporting hypofractionated radiation in the treatment of breast cancer.

An 8-year follow-up of HER2-positive breast cancer patients receiving adjuvant trastuzumab shows an overall low incidence of cardiac events when administered after chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and Indiana University found that women who had a greater number of nevi may be more likely to develop breast cancer, independent of other breast cancer risk factors.

The breast cancer treatment landscape is changing, and the optimal adjuvant endocrine therapy for premenopausal women with hormone receptor (HR)-positive breast cancer is uncertain.

At the ASCO/AACR Joint Session on Inflammatory Cells and Cancer, Dr. Andrew Dannenberg from Weill Cornell Medical College, gave a fascinating lecture titled “Stromal Inflammation and Solid Tumors.”

As part of our coverage of the 2014 ASCO Annual Meeting, we discuss treatment strategies for breast cancer patients who harbor either the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation.

After surgery, adjuvant therapy with trastuzumab alone works just as well as trastuzumab combined with lapatinib for women with early-stage HER2-positive breast cancer.

Zoledronic acid given every 12 weeks was just as efficacious as the drug administered at the standard dosing schedule of every 4 weeks for breast cancer patients with bone metastases.

Metastatic breast cancer patients with insulin resistance have a significantly worse prognosis, according to the results of a study presented at the 2014 ASCO Annual Meeting.

The combined analysis of two phase III clinical trials shows that exemestane, an aromatase inhibitor, may better prevent breast cancer recurrence in women with early-stage hormone receptor–positive breast cancer, as compared with tamoxifen.

A follow-up analysis of gene expression signatures from the CALGB 40601 trial shows that certain HER2-positive early-stage breast cancer patients may not benefit from more aggressive chemotherapy treatments as part of a neoadjuvant regimen, and that patients with HER2-enriched tumors responded best to dual anti-HER2 treatment.

A new study shows that women diagnosed with cancer in one breast often opt to undergo a contralateral prophylactic mastectomy, even though they may not have a significant risk of developing cancer in the other breast.

Detectable circulating tumor cells in early breast cancer patients can predict prognosis, according to a newly published study.

An analysis of early-stage breast cancer shows that obesity raises the risk of dying from breast cancer for pre-menopausal women diagnosed with ER-positive disease.

The progress that has been made by the surgical breast oncology community is a well-deserved source of pride. This is not to say, however, that our work is complete.

Validation of sentinel lymph node (SLN) dissection (SLND) as an alternative to axillary lymph node dissection (ALND) has been a significant advance in the surgical management of breast cancer.

Molecular imaging allows accurate detection of metastatic disease. It also allows for noninvasive assessment of tumors and is a predictor of response to therapy.

However, it is becoming ever clearer that tumor characteristics can change during the course of disease. Given this change over time, other supporting techniques for guiding therapy would be of value. Molecular radionuclide imaging with positron emission tomography (PET) can potentially fulfill this need.

We review how radiolabeled glucose and estrogen analogs can be used in breast cancer patients. We focus this review on the application of positron emission tomography imaging to ER-positive metastatic breast cancer as an example of how imaging can guide breast cancer treatment.

Here we review the evolution of sentinel lymph node biopsy for the management of clinically node-negative breast cancer, and we address the current controversies and management issues.

With the goal of helping to standardize and optimize care, ASCO has issued two new clinical guidelines on treating patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.

A retrospective analysis found that breast cancer patients with advanced disease are 1.6 times more likely to incur postoperative complications compared with early-stage patients.