Doctors examine primary tumors and nearby lymph nodes to assess cancer spread, as node-positive breast tumors require obligatory chemotherapy. Most breast cancers are "node-negative" (confined to the breast), but, if left untreated, one fourth of these patients die from occult systemic disease ("micrometastasis"). Women with node-negative breast tumors that overexpress metastasis-associated 1 (MTA1) protein had recurrence risks identical to women with systemic disease (RR 2.7, p = 0.0006). For the ...
Although a majority of women with node-negative breast cancers have a good prognosis, 30% experience recurrence and death from metastatic disease. As result, systemic therapies are routinely administered to nearly all of these node-negative patients. Markers that better predict recurrence risk would more effectively target adjuvant therapies to the patients most likely to benefit from them. Our goal is to identify the genetic markers that 1) are differentially expressed in ...
Some breast cancers spread (metastasize) to distant sites, putting the patient at high risk of death from this disorder. Clinicians now use tumor size, tumor appearance, and especially the presence of metastasis (cancer spread to local lymph nodes, or "node-positive breast cancer") to estimate the risk of early breast cancer death. These measures are imperfect, since 30% of the patients who should have a good outcome (no cancer spread to ...
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