Doctors Predict Breast Cancer Survival

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Research reveals a new way to predict which breast cancers are likely to recur and which ones are likely to stay away for good.

Right now, researchers predict whether a cancer is likely to recur by determining whether tumor cells have entered the lymph nodes near the breast. Now, researchers from Stanford University in Calif. say taking a look at immune cells inside lymph nodes instead of tumor cells could be more accurate. The result could lead to a decision to undergo more aggressive treatment to increase the chances of eliminating the cancer for good.

Peter P. Lee, M.D., from Stanford, says, "Immune changes in the lymph node almost perfectly predict clinical outcome, much better than any other prognostic factor that is available today."

Researchers compared the immune profiles to whether a cancer returned within five years. They found unique patterns of immune cells. Dr. Lee says patients with a favorable immune profile had up to a 90-percent chance of being cancer-free five years later. Patients who had an unfavorable immune profile had less than a 15-percent chance of being cancer-free.

Dr. Lee says the predictions on whether a patient’s cancer would recur could be made solely based on the immune cells, regardless of whether a lymph node contained tumor cells.

Holbrook Kohrt, M.D., lead author of the paper says, "The nice thing about this technique is that it could be applied to all women with breast cancer. It's awesome that such a simple idea could affect more than 200,000 patients a year." He adds, "This is a shot in the arm for the field. The immunology of breast cancer has not been very well explored yet, and these findings argue that the immune system is more important in cancer than previously thought."

According to the American Cancer Society, more than 211,000 women in the United States will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year. About 40,000 of them will die from the disease. More than 2 million people living in the United States have been treated for breast cancer.

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SOURCE: Public Library of Science-Medicine, 2005;2(9):e284