In these last days of this month called Pink October, organized each year for breast cancer screening – a cancer that is cured in 90% of cases – decryption of an American study which could be a source of hope for avoid surgery, results to be interpreted with caution, according to Géraldine Zamansky, journalist at Health magazine on France 5.
franceinfo: Is it serious, have women really been able to get rid of their breast tumor by avoiding surgery?
Geraldine Zamansky: This is very serious but beware, even the American authors of this clinical trial call for caution when interpreting their results. Because they are limited for the moment to a small group of 31 women who had been very selected, and who were followed for an average of only two years.
But none of them saw their cancer reappear after having fought it, by the combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy without any surgical operation. To us, that sounds great of course. The perspective of a specialist like Professor François-Clément Bidard, oncologist at the Institut Curie, is as moderate as his American colleagues suggest. But he still sees in it an encouragement to new research, to enlarge this group in complete safety.
How did the American team select the patients?
The criteria were very strict. The study only included women whose cancer was at an early stage, and with a type of cell easily destroyed by chemotherapy. For the most informed, it was either so-called HER2 breast cancers, or those called triple negatives. At the start they were 50. And for more than half of the group, after chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the tumor was less than 2 cm.
So a biopsy, a sample, was taken there with the help of ultrasound to be sure of being in the right place. And in fact, no cancer cells were found. It was now just some kind of scar area. That’s why the team tried to spare these women surgery.
But of course, at this stage, it is impossible to generalize this approach?
Exactly. Professor Bidard reminded me that these two types of cancer are unfortunately among those that recur the most. If the biopsy misses a few treatment-resistant cells, they can lead to a relapse that is much more difficult to treat. At that time, it is no longer possible to remove only a small part of the breast as at the first diagnosis.
So for this oncologist, new techniques must be found capable of avoiding this risk, by identifying the smallest cell still present. And it may not take too long. Because with the incredible progress of immunotherapy for other cancers, this question arises more and more often. We can hope that the number of patients concerned will stimulate the financing of effective research!
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– The study
– MD Anderson Center, University of Texas