Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Health and medicine

New guidelines often mean less chemo for breast cancer patients

SAN ANTONIO - For years, doctors have known exactly what to do with breast cancer patients like Eva Ossorio: Poison them.

Blasting women with toxic chemicals was considered the best way to save their lives. The bigger the cancer or the more it had spread, the more vile liquid doctors pumped into their veins to try to kill it.

But there's been a sea change in the past year.

Guidelines adopted in Europe and similar ones unveiled this weekend at a conference in Texas will result in far fewer women getting chemotherapy in the future.

The new advice calls for choosing a treatment based on each woman's particular type of tumor.

Under the new rules, hormone status - whether a tumor's growth depends on estrogen or progesterone - becomes the single most important factor in picking treatment.

That is why Ossorio, a 62-year-old nurse in San Antonio, last week was started on a hormone blocker rather than the chemo she formerly would have been given.

"I don't care if I die tomorrow. I decided I didn't want chemotherapy," she said.

Women have reason to dread it. Chemo is a sledgehammer, killing all rapidly dividing cells whether they are out-of-control cancerous ones or healthy ones that naturally grow quickly, like those lining the mouth and stomach. That's why chemo causes hair loss, nausea and mouth sores.

But the worst part is, it only helps about 15 percent of those who get it after the usual surgery to remove their tumors.

Recent developments help doctors pick who really needs it.

First is the realization that breast cancers have different causes, arise from different types of cells, are driven by different genes and tend to be different in women before or after menopause.

"Breast cancer must be understood as an umbrella of diseases," said Dr. Antonio Wolff of Johns Hopkins Medical Institute in Baltimore.

[Last modified December 11, 2005, 02:15:36]