Breast cancer is the number one cancer in women.
Just this year, doctors expect 288,000 new cases of breast cancer around the world.
A breast cancer diagnosis used to mean aggressive chemotherapy to get rid of it.
But a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that’s not the case anymore.
“Chemotherapy is very hard chemicals that have both short term and long term complications and if you’re not going to benefit from that then there’s no point in doing it,” explained Dr. Jehanzeb Riaz, an oncologist at Covenant Health.
Dr. Riaz says not everyone will benefit from chemo.
“The past 10 years or so we’ve been able to individualize the treatment so some of our patients might not need chemo especially patients with early stage breast cancer,” Dr. Riaz said.
A genetic test categorizes patients as low risk, intermediate risk and high risk.
“Low risk are the ones that will not benefit from chemo and they are well managed by the hormonal treatments,” said Dr. Riaz. “The high risk are the ones that always benefit from chemotherapy.”
A large amount of patients fall into the intermediate category.
Dr. Riaz says it wasn’t always clear on the best way to treat patients with an intermediate risk of breast cancer, so doctors would stay on the safe side and offer chemotherapy.
“We were able to eliminate about 70 percent of those patients who would have got chemo prior to the results of this study that now we will be able to avoid all that extra treatment burdens,” explained Dr. Riaz.
Dr. Riaz says this is something that Covenant Health has been doing with its patients for years.
And this study helps clarify a lot of confusion on what treatment is best.
“It’s more reassurance for both the physician and for the patient that by withholding chemo they’re not taking a huge risk,” Dr. Riaz said.
Dr. Riaz adds early detection is the key to early diagnosis which is why it’s so important get mammograms every year.
