Scientists at the Royal Liverpool University Hospitals in the UK have found a way of testing whether certain abnormalities in a womans breast are likely to go on to develop into breast cancer, the 3rd European Breast Cancer Conference in Barcelona heard today (Wednesday 20 March).
Armed with information from the test, doctors could then consider whether the at-risk women should be offered prophylactic anti-oestrogen treatment such as tamoxifen or more frequent screening.
However, Dr Abeer M. Shaaban, a Specialist Registrar in the hospitals department of Cellular and Molecular Pathology, warned that, while the test itself was fairly straightforward to do, it might be many years before it could lead to the development of prophylactic treatments, especially as clinical trials are still being run to test the effectiveness of anti-oestrogens such as tamoxifen in preventing breast cancer.
Hyperplasia of usual type (HUT) is a benign abnormality in the breast. Although it is formed by cell proliferation, it is not cancer, but it is associated with a slightly increased risk of cancer developing subsequently. Women who have HUT have a risk of developing breast cancer of between 1.5 and 2 times that of the general population. Normally HUT cannot be detected by self-examination, and is usually spotted during screening and diagnosed following a biopsy.
Dr. Shaaban, working with Professor Christopher S. Foster, head of the hospitals Pathology Laboratories, studied 674 biopsies from a 20-year period between 1979 and 1999 to see whether those samples that belonged to patients who had subsequently developed breast cancer contained different biological signals to samples from women who did not develop cancer. The biopsies included cases from 120 women who subsequently developed cancer and 382 who did not during the 20-year follow-up.
She found that in samples from women who had developed breast cancer subsequently, there was a high propo
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Federation of European Cancer Societies
20-Mar-2002