After 20 years of screening for breast and prostate cancer, several observations can be made. First, the incidence of these cancers increased after the introduction of screening but has never ...returned to prescreening levels. Second, the increase in the relative fraction of early stage cancers has increased. Third, the incidence of regional cancers has not decreased at a commensurate rate. One possible explanation is that screening may be increasing the burden of low-risk cancers without significantly reducing the burden of more aggressively growing cancers and therefore not resulting in the anticipated reduction in cancer mortality. To reduce morbidity and mortality from prostate cancer and breast cancer, new approaches for screening, early detection, and prevention for both diseases should be considered.
Leukocyte composition of human breast cancer Ruffell, Brian; Au, Alfred; Rugo, Hope S ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
02/2012, Letnik:
109, Številka:
8
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Retrospective clinical studies have used immune-based biomarkers, alone or in combination, to predict survival outcomes for women with breast cancer (BC); however, the limitations inherent to ...immunohistochemical analyses prevent comprehensive descriptions of leukocytic infiltrates, as well as evaluation of the functional state of leukocytes in BC stroma. To more fully evaluate this complexity, and to gain insight into immune responses after chemotherapy (CTX), we prospectively evaluated tumor and nonadjacent normal breast tissue from women with BC, who either had or had not received neoadjuvant CTX before surgery. Tissues were evaluated by polychromatic flow cytometry in combination with confocal immunofluorescence and immunohistochemical analysis of tissue sections. These studies revealed that activated T lymphocytes predominate in tumor tissue, whereas myeloid lineage cells are more prominant in "normal" breast tissue. Notably, residual tumors from an unselected group of BC patients treated with neoadjuvant CTX contained increased percentages of infiltrating myeloid cells, accompanied by an increased CD8/CD4 T-cell ratio and higher numbers of granzyme B-expressing cells, compared with tumors removed from patients treated primarily by surgery alone. These data provide an initial evaluation of differences in the immune microenvironment of BC compared with nonadjacent normal tissue and reveal the degree to which CTX may alter the complexity and presence of selective subsets of immune cells in tumors previously treated in the neoadjuvant setting.
Journal
Journal of Clinical Oncology
It is important to reflect on how far we as a medical community have come when treating breast cancer. Ongoing research, clinical trials, and better understanding ...of biology have transformed our understanding and treatment of breast cancer. There is still much to learn. Although progress was slow for decades, treatments have evolved more quickly in the recent past. The Halsted radical mastectomy, first popularized in 1894, was performed for almost a century, and although it decreased local recurrence, it did not improve survival. This well-intentioned surgery disfigured women and was abandoned as better systemic therapies were introduced and less aggressive surgical procedures were found to be equivalent in clinical trials. The evolution of trials in the modern era has taught us an important lesson. De-escalation of surgical interventions in the setting of improved systemic therapy can lead to better patient outcomes. We present a case of a clinician with an early-stage invasive ductal carcinoma responsive to neoadjuvant endocrine therapy and who subsequently underwent a partial mastectomy with axillary sentinal lymph node biopsy. Although clinically node-negative, she was pathologically node-positive, and concerned about both optimizing her outcomes and minimizing the risk of lymphedema. The release of 10-year follow-up data from the AMAROS trial furthers our knowledge and understanding of the impact of local control measures of the axilla. The concepts illustrated by the findings of AMAROS may be applied in clinical practice and ultimately help us make rational treatment choices and support shared decision making for patients like ours.
Esserman et al point out that the original intent of screening was to detect cancer at the earliest stages to improve outcomes; however, detection of cancers with better biology contributes to better ...outcomes. Screening always results in identifying more indolent disease. Although no physician has the intention to overtreat or overdiagnose cancer, screening and patient awareness have increased the chance of identifying a spectrum of cancers, some of which aren't life threatening. Policies that prevent or reduce the chance of overdiagnosis and avoid overtreatment are needed, while maintaining those gains by which early detection is a major contributor to decreasing mortality and locally advanced disease. The recommendations of the task force are intended as initial approaches. Physicians and patients should engage in open discussion about these complex issues. The media should better understand and communicate the message so that as a community the approach to screening can be improved.
It has been demonstrated that, in early breast cancer, there is no survival benefit to additional treatment once a patient has achieved a pathologic complete response (pCR). Together with the ...well-established prognostic association between pCR and survival, this presents a strong rationale for escalation/deescalation of neoadjuvant treatment based upon response.
.
There are few medical issues that have generated as much controversy as screening for breast cancer. In science, controversy often stimulates innovation; however, the intensely divisive debate over ...mammographic screening has had the opposite effect and has stifled progress. The same two questions-whether it is better to screen annually or bi-annually, and whether women are best served by beginning screening at 40 or some later age-have been debated for 20 years, based on data generated three to four decades ago. The controversy has continued largely because our current approach to screening assumes all women have the same risk for the same type of breast cancer. In fact, we now know that cancers vary tremendously in terms of timing of onset, rate of growth, and probability of metastasis. In an era of personalized medicine, we have the opportunity to investigate tailored screening based on a woman's specific risk for a specific tumor type, generating new data that can inform best practices rather than to continue the rancorous debate. It is time to move from debate to wisdom by asking new questions and generating new knowledge. The WISDOM Study (Women Informed to Screen Depending On Measures of risk) is a pragmatic, adaptive, randomized clinical trial comparing a comprehensive risk-based, or personalized approach to traditional annual breast cancer screening. The multicenter trial will enroll 100,000 women, powered for a primary endpoint of non-inferiority with respect to the number of late stage cancers detected. The trial will determine whether screening based on personalized risk is as safe, less morbid, preferred by women, will facilitate prevention for those most likely to benefit, and adapt as we learn who is at risk for what kind of cancer. Funded by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, WISDOM is the product of a multi-year stakeholder engagement process that has brought together consumers, advocates, primary care physicians, specialists, policy makers, technology companies and payers to help break the deadlock in this debate and advance towards a new, dynamic approach to breast cancer screening.
Ongoing controversy over the optimal approach to breast cancer screening has led to discordant professional society recommendations, particularly in women age 40 to 49 years. One potential solution ...is risk-based screening, where decisions around the starting age, stopping age, frequency, and modality of screening are based on individual risk to maximize the early detection of aggressive cancers and minimize the harms of screening through optimal resource utilization. We present a novel approach to risk-based screening that integrates clinical risk factors, breast density, a polygenic risk score representing the cumulative effects of genetic variants, and sequencing for moderate- and high-penetrance germline mutations. We demonstrate how thresholds of absolute risk estimates generated by our prediction tools can be used to stratify women into different screening strategies (biennial mammography, annual mammography, annual mammography with adjunctive magnetic resonance imaging, defer screening at this time) while informing the starting age of screening for women age 40 to 49 years. Our risk thresholds and corresponding screening strategies are based on current evidence but need to be tested in clinical trials. The Women Informed to Screen Depending On Measures of risk (WISDOM) Study, a pragmatic, preference-tolerant randomized controlled trial of annual vs personalized screening, will study our proposed approach. WISDOM will evaluate the efficacy, safety, and acceptability of risk-based screening beginning in the fall of 2016. The adaptive design of this trial allows continued refinement of our risk thresholds as the trial progresses, and we discuss areas where we anticipate emerging evidence will impact our approach.
Should we rename low risk cancers? Esserman, Laura J; Varma, Murali
BMJ (Online),
2019-Jan-23, 2019-01-23, 20190123, Letnik:
364
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Laura J Esserman argues that patients are unnecessarily alarmed by calling low risk tumours cancer, but Murali Varma argues that alternative names can also be confusing and better education is the ...answer
Summary A vast range of disorders—from indolent to fast-growing lesions—are labelled as cancer. Therefore, we believe that several changes should be made to the approach to cancer screening and care, ...such as use of new terminology for indolent and precancerous disorders. We propose the term indolent lesion of epithelial origin, or IDLE, for those lesions (currently labelled as cancers) and their precursors that are unlikely to cause harm if they are left untreated. Furthermore, precursors of cancer or high-risk disorders should not have the term cancer in them. The rationale for this change in approach is that indolent lesions with low malignant potential are common, and screening brings indolent lesions and their precursors to clinical attention, which leads to overdiagnosis and, if unrecognised, possible overtreatment. To minimise that potential, new strategies should be adopted to better define and manage IDLEs. Screening guidelines should be revised to lower the chance of detection of minimal-risk IDLEs and inconsequential cancers with the same energy traditionally used to increase the sensitivity of screening tests. Changing the terminology for some of the lesions currently referred to as cancer will allow physicians to shift medicolegal notions and perceived risk to reflect the evolving understanding of biology, be more judicious about when a biopsy should be done, and organise studies and registries that offer observation or less invasive approaches for indolent disease. Emphasis on avoidance of harm while assuring benefit will improve screening and treatment of patients and will be equally effective in the prevention of death from cancer.
PDF
