That's
the headline of an article posted on the Cancer Research UK website. It’s the
kind of a headline that made me think of so many questions that I had to read
the article.
The
article itself reports that “Breast cancer cells that break off from tumours
have a biological 'fingerprint' that could allow doctors to spot women whose
disease is likely to spread to the brain, according to US research.”
I
had to reread this first sentence of the article several times, because it
seemed so punitive: “Breast cancer cells that break off from tumours have a
biological 'fingerprint' that could allow doctors to spot women whose disease
is likely to spread to the brain, according to US research.”
I
never knew that breast cancer cells can migrate and start causing brain
cancer. So some poor woman first gets
the news that, “Sorry, you have breast cancer.” And then, she gets the double
whammy of “and, by the way, you breast cancer has morphed into brain cancer.”
Of
course, the problems don’t stop there. According the abstract of the original
research, from Sciencemag.com, “Brain metastatic breast cancer (BMBC) is
uniformly fatal and increasing in frequency. Despite its devastating outcome,
mechanisms causing BMBC remain largely unknown.”
The
words “uniformly fatal” and “increasing in frequency” sound pretty scary to me
alone, let alone used together in the same sentence.
Nonetheless,
these plucky researchers see this as good news announcing that “This could lead
to better ways of treating women with the disease, and even to new drugs to
stop it spreading.”
Here’s
a link the Cancer Research UK website article: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/news/archive/cancernews/2013-04-10-Researchers-uncover-fingerprint-of-breast-cancers-that-spread-to-the-brain
And
here’s the link to the original research abstract entitled The Identification and Characterization of Breast Cancer CTCs Competent
for Brain Metastasis: http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/5/180/180ra48
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