New Study Shows Chemotherapy For Breast Cancer Usually Unnecessary

Medical Celia Hoffman
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The fear and the pain that women who are diagnosed as having the first stages of breast cancer undergo because of the present tendency to treat all breast cancer with chemotherapy is unnecessary and more dangerous than the possibility of developing breast cancer according to a new study conducted by David Hunter with Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health that was published in the August 24, 2016, edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Hunter and colleagues found that the administration of a commercially available genomic test to women who are suspected of developing breast cancer can prevent the overuse of chemotherapy in 46 percent of the women involved in the study. The test costs $4,200 and is covered by some health insurance in the United States.

The study involved 6,600 women in nine European countries at 112 institutions. The study found that 95 percent of the women who demonstrated physical symptoms of breast cancer and did not opt for chemotherapy had no metastasis of their breast cancer in five years. The genetic test examines 70 known markers for the existence of breast cancer, the development of breast cancer, and the potential for metastasis.

The women in the study were assigned to a chemotherapy group and a no chemotherapy group based on the genetic results. The researchers acknowledge some resistance on the part of some of the participants based on the fear of cancer and the perception of chemotherapy as an absolute cure. The actual success rate of chemotherapy is 2 percent according to Dr. Clifford Hudis with the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

The discovery has produced an intense debate in the United States. Calls for U. S. replication of the study top the issues that oncologists and physicians in the United Sates have with the genetic test that costs much less than chemotherapy, avoids unnecessary treatment, and can ease the fears of cancer and treatment in women who have breast cancer or the symptoms of breast cancer.