In my opinion, Chemo should only be use as the last resort. Take herbal drinks & Alkaline water to clean out the acidic conditions of the body...
Test Shows Who Needs Chemo for Cancer
Sat Dec 11, 8:05 AM ET By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new genetic test can tell doctors which breast cancer patients need to undergo the discomfort of chemotherapy -- and suggests many women don't need to, researchers said on Friday.
Almost half of U.S. women diagnosed with a specific form of breast cancer -- estrogen-dependent cancer that has not yet spread -- can skip the chemo, the results suggest. That means about 25,000, mostly older women a year, according to the National Cancer Institute (news - web sites), which helped sponsor the study.
'The test has the potential to change medical practice by sparing thousands of women each year from the harmful short- and long-term side effects associated with chemotherapy,' said Dr. JoAnne Zujewski of the NCI's Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program.
The study results, released early by the New England Journal of Medicine (news - web sites) and also at the San Antonio Breast Cancer (news - web sites) Symposium, are based on a study of gene activity in the breast cancer tumors.
Dr. Soonmyung Paik and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh and elsewhere used tissue samples from women enrolled in past clinical trials of the cancer drug tamoxifen, which blocks the effect of estrogen on breast cancer cells.
About 80 percent of breast cancer patients have the kind of cancer that responds to hormone-based therapy like tamoxifen, and the drug has been shown to reduce the cancer's spread.
But the question has been who can safely get away with just surgery and either tamoxifen or newer, hormone-based drugs called aromatase inhibitors.
Paik's team used samples from 668 patients who got surgery and tamoxifen but not chemotherapy, and looked at 16 different cancer-related genes to see which ones were active." Read More...
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