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I lost my mother to metastatic breast cancer in 1992. I was her caregiver at the end of life. When I first arrived home, my mother was fragile and weak, but mobile. Chemotherapy had made her very ill and her doctor had prescribed enteral nutrition to improve her nutritional status and strength. I had learned to install the device every night to get a preparation through the same port in her chest where she had received her chemotherapy.
My naivety allowed me to deny the fact that it would end. I thought that after a few weeks of extra nutrition, she would come back as if she had done it after her chemotherapy. Instead, she made the decision to stop chemotherapy. She had reached the limits offered by medicine.
The following weeks were a surrealist experience. My diary reminds me of the daily details that my memory has hidden: the connection of her food intake, her level of pain, her lucidity, the trips to the hospital, the conversations with the nurse and her siblings, personal reflections .
I am grateful to remember poignant moments with clarity. These are the memories that keep her close to me every day.
What I also have in mind is my sense of helplessness as his life escaped from us, my frustration and anger at the system that had let him down.
As we approach the end of another month of breast cancer awareness, I am fully aware that thousands of family members are living a similar experience with someone they do not know. love. Many of them may also feel anger at a system that makes their loved one fail. I hope their experience will also require them, like mine, to try to change the future of other families and patients facing a diagnosis of breast cancer.
More than 20 years after the death of my mother, I started my own journey. After completing my Ph.D., I had the ambition to contribute to the fight against breast cancer through university research. Where I found my niche, however, is in the non-profit sector, which led me to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF), the only non-profit organization for a unique mission to advance breast cancer research. It was here that I understood the impact of research on saving lives and improving outcomes for breast cancer patients.
Looking back, I realize now that research is the reason why my mother flourished as long as she did. I am grateful for the drugs that have prolonged his life. After her initial diagnosis and treatment, she witnessed the wedding of a son and a daughter, held her new grandchildren in her arms, traveled, spent time in her garden and played with his favorite four-legged friend.
Research is the reason why more than 3.5 million women and men live beyond breast cancer in the United States today. Research is why deaths from breast cancer have decreased by almost 40% since my mother's death.
But 40,000 women and men continue to lose their lives each year because of the disease. While there is still much to be done, over the past 25 years, we have made key discoveries that bring us closer to a world without breast cancer, including:
Hereditary breast cancer
The discovery of the BRCA genes has led to genetic tests of hereditary breast cancer that save lives and have prompted researchers to search for other genetic links with breast cancer.
Targeted therapies
Tamoxifen was the first effective targeted therapy to treat and prevent the most common type of breast cancer, estrogen-related cancers. If Tamoxifen had been used at the time of my mother's diagnosis, I think she would have lived much longer and may never have had the recurrence that cost her her life. Herceptin (trastuzumab) is another targeted therapy that has turned a potentially life-threatening type of breast cancer called HER2 into a treatable condition.
New treatments for metastatic breast cancer
Two classes of drugs, PARP inhibitors and CDK 4/6 inhibitors, have recently shown a significant improvement in survival in patients with advanced breast cancer induced by BRCA mutations (PARP) and estrogen (CDK4 / 6). New immunotherapy drugs are on the horizon for patients with triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive disease that disproportionately affects African-Americans and younger women.
New diagnostics
Genetic tests such as OncotypeDx® and MammaPrint® help guide treatment decisions in early-stage breast cancer so that patients with more aggressive illness get the right treatment and others can forego the extra cost and the toxicity of potent chemotherapies.
Although much of the world is focused on breast cancer in the month of October, patients, caregivers, doctors, and researchers are living it everyday. I am grateful for the opportunity to be part of the BCRF team.
Looking into the future, I hope the research will end the fear of breast cancer. My hope is that breast cancer, such as heart disease, diabetes and other chronic diseases associated with aging, will become a manageable and curable disease through accurate and well-founded treatment and prevention approaches. on evidence.
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