San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium

A study recommends use of trastuzumab concurrently with the taxane portion of chemotherapy for breast cancer patients.

In the BIG 1-98 trial, high-risk patients did best with 5 years of letrozole and low-risk patients did similarly well with any of the trial%u2019s regimens.

Many patients who chose mastectomy were not at increased breast-cancer risk and may have done so based on a failed attempt at breast-conservation surgery.

Anthracycline chemotherapy plus trastuzumab outperformed anthracycline alone, and performed similarly to a non-anthracycline regimen in breast cancer patients.

For patients with early breast cancer, peripheral neurotoxicity is an unfortunate side effect of treatment with taxanes, but there may be a silver lining.

Doubling the dose of fulvestrant increases the time to disease progression in the treatment of postmenopausal women with breast cancer.

The multi-targeted kinase inhibitor sorafenib, approved to treat kidney and liver cancer, may also benefit patients with metastatic breast cancer.

About 10 months of neoadjuvant letrozole is optimal for breast-conserving surgery in patients with early breast cancer.

Updated results confirm that addition of bevacizumab to docetaxel as first-line breast cancer treatment improves survival and response rates.

Lung cancer deaths are significantly less common in breast cancer patients who are treated with anti-estrogens.

Sorafenib showed promise when combined with chemotherapy for locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer.

Adding bevacizumab to chemotherapy improved survival compared with chemotherapy alone in breast cancer patients.

Letrozole treatment over 5 years was still associated with significantly better overall survival than 5 years with tamoxifen.

The RANK ligand inhibitor denosumab was better than the standard-of-care bisphosphonate, zoledronic acid in breast cancer patients with bone metastases.

Consumption of just a half drink per day, or two to three per week, raised the risk of recurrence of breast cancer in women by 39%.

Postmenopausal women with breast cancer who use exemestane after taking tamoxifen have superior outcomes than those who stay on tamoxifen for 5 years.

Which is better: Tamoxifen upfront followed by an aromatase inhibitor (AI) for 5 years, or an AI for 5 years. Final results failed to resolve this issue.

The use of oral bisphosphonates may protect against the development of invasive breast cancer, according to a new analysis by the Women's Health Initiative.

Alternating mammography and MRI every 6 months appears to be the best way to detect cancer in high-risk women, an M.D. Anderson study found. This strategy can identify cancers not found by mammography alone, said Huong Le-Petross, MD, assistant professor, Diagnostic Radiology, who presented a retrospective pilot study at a poster session during the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Previous studies have shown that the Oncotype DX Recurrence Score accurately estimates the risk of breast cancer recurrence in postmenopausal women with a diagnosis of invasive node-negative early stage estrogen-receptor–positive breast cancer who have undergone treatment with tamoxifen.

One of the primary goals in oncology research is finding ways to predict each woman’s individual risk of breast cancer.

Estimating survival for patients with early breast cancer for up to 15 years is possible, report researchers from Duke.

Herceptin plus docetaxel/cyclophosphamide (HER TC) adjuvant therapy—a non-anthracycline-containing regimen—was tolerable with acceptable safety for lower risk patients with HER2-positive early breast cancer, according to a large Phase II study.

Previous research indicates that dense breast tissue is a risk factor for breast cancer development. Some studies have suggested that women who have highly dense breasts (≥60%-75% dense tissue) were as much as six times more likely to develop carcinoma of the breast than women whose breasts consisted primarily of fatty tissue.

Tamoxifen, long considered the gold standard for treating estrogen-receptor (ER) positive, early-stage breast cancer, is known to increase the risk of thrombotic events (blood clots).

Researchers have released findings from a large retrospective study showing that women treated for early stage HER2-positive breast cancer tumors ≤ 1cm have a significantly greater risk of recurrence than women whose tumors are HER2-negative.

Although hormonal therapy with aromatase inhibitors is highly effective at preventing recurrence in menopausal women with breast cancer, several studies have shown that adherence leaves something to be desired.

A study reveals a beneficial effect of tamoxifen on breast cancer recurrences at 10 and 15 years of follow-up in women with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS).