Hope for Young Breast Cancer Patients
Reported July 14, 2008
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — Breast cancer tends to be more aggressive and less treatable in young women, and new research points to a possible reason.
Researchers looked at samples of nearly 800 breast tumors from women in five countries on three continents. After dividing them into age-specific cohorts, they found more than 350 sets of genes that were active only in younger tumors — tumors found in women under age 45. In addition, tumors found in women over age 65 did not share these activated genes.
The breast tumors that arose in younger women shared a common biology, and this discovery was truly remarkable, Kimberly Blackwell, M.D., a breast oncologist at Duke University Medical Center and lead researcher, was quoted as saying.
Researchers have already developed compounds that target some of the activated gene expression pathways found in the breast tumors of young women, and many of these compounds show promise for fighting these tumors, Dr. Blackwell explained.
Many of the gene sets we saw in younger tumors distinguished these cancers from older tumors but the reverse was not true — there was nothing we saw in the older womens tumors that set them apart genomically, Dr. Blackwell said. Identifying these distinguishing characteristics may be the first step in developing more effective treatments for these younger patients.
SOURCE: Journal of Clinical Oncology, 2008;26:3324-3330