'Promising' scientific breakthrough could predict breast cancer return

An exciting new scientific discovery could allow health professionals to determine if women with bad cancer are likely to relapse.

In the UK, every year, more than 55,000 women are diagnosed with bad cancer, and one in eight women is likely to develop the disease at some point in their lives.

Secondary bad cancer, which occurs when bad cancer cells spread to other parts of the body, can not be cured, although it can be treated.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh believe they have discovered a way to identify the genetic changes occurring in women with bad cancer.

Tracking these genetic changes can then help physicians determine if women with bad cancer are at risk of relapse and prevent their development of secondary bad cancer by offering them alternative treatments.

For the study, which was published in the newspaper Breast cancer researchThe researchers studied tumor samples taken from 62 bad cancer patients and taking aromatase inhibitors for two years.

Aromatase inhibitors are a group of drugs used to treat bad cancer in women with menopause.

None of the women involved in the study had previously had their tumor removed surgically.

Tumor specimens were collected before women started their hormone therapy after a few weeks of treatment and then after a four month period.

The team found that hormone therapy caused almost instantaneous changes in "activated" genes in tumors.

Not only have these changes become more pronounced over time, but scientists have noted a difference in the "chemical signature" changes that occurred in tumors of women whose bad cancer had become resistant to treatment of those who did not. did not have any.

"Resistance to treatment is hard to study and lab experiments often do not look much like the situation of patients," says Dr. Andy Sims, senior researcher at the MRC's Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine.

"This is the first time we are able to study genetic changes in tumors of individual patients over time.

"We hope that the results will help develop new tests to predict which hormone-treated women are at risk of relapse, so that they can be offered alternative treatments."

The research was partially funded by Breast Cancer Now, the UK's largest charity for bad cancer.

Dr. Simon Vincent, director of research at Charity, believes that the results of the study could prove extremely beneficial for the development of new forms of bad cancer treatment.

"This is a promising early discovery that may help us better understand how some bad cancers become resistant to treatment and what we can do to address them," said Dr. Vincent.

"Drug resistance is a major hurdle that we must overcome if we want to finally stop women from dying of bad cancer.

"Through such research, we hope to be able to one day determine when treatments become less effective and when a change in treatment might be appropriate."