FEATURE ARTICLE – FIGHTING BREAST CANCER – AND WINNING!
Women wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for the advances of CSDT – 1) Cancer Screening, 2) Diagnosis and 3) Treatment
Doctors comments:
INCREASED SCREENING – Professor Peter Johnson, Chief Clinician at Cancer Research, UK says:
‘The likelihood of surviving breast cancer has been going up steadily since screening programmes started.
However, we’ve had no way of telling which lumps are dangerous and which are not. Our research now is concentrating on discovering which ones are the MOST DANGEROUS – for Breast Cancer, and for Prostate and Bowel Cancer, too’
ADVANCES IN GENETICS – Professor Johnson says:
‘One of the big discoveries in the last 10 years or so is how we can use the genetic changes that make people more likely to develop cancer as Targets for our Treatment. These changes can make cancer cells more fragile, and we now have drugs that take advantage of that frailty to treat cancers while sparing normal cells’
IMPROVEMENTS IN TREATMENT – Professor Johnson says:
‘We’ve come a long way since the early days of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. We now have more effective treatments and are much better at controlling side effects.
The new generation of cancer treatments works in quite different ways –
- using the body’s immune system to fight the cancer;
- picking key genetic targets in the cancer cells to attack;
- or using radiation in a more sophisticated way to avoid damage to healthy tissues’
April/15