April 1 (Reuters) – Advanced genetic testing could help erase a huge disparity in breast cancer survival rates between white and black patients, new research has found.
Currently, black women in the US have a 40% higher death rate from breast cancer than white women, despite the low rate of 5% of the disease.
Register Here.
Using genetic analysis of early breast cancer samples collected from more than a thousand women, researchers found that Black women have high-risk tumors that are often missed by routine clinical biomarker testing, such as estrogen receptor status. That leads to less attention, which may result in negative consequences.
Three-year recurrence-free survival was driven by genomic subtype, not race, the researchers found.
Black women with low-risk tumors based on MammaPrint and BluePrint had “excellent 10-year outcomes, with a recurrence-free survival rate of 97.7%, a similar outcome to white women,” the researchers reported.
Patients with high-risk tumors were five to 10 times more likely to have distant metastases than those with benign tumors, regardless of race.
About half of the patients who were identified as low-risk developed aggressive tumors based on genomic profiling, the researchers also found.
The data suggest that “tumor genomic testing for all patients may help guide treatment decisions to reduce racial disparities among black women with breast cancer,” said study co-author Dr. Andrea Menicucci from Agendia.
HEART ATTACK SURVIVORS MAY NOT NEED BETA-BLOCKERS
Stable, low-risk heart attack survivors can stop taking drugs from a class known as beta-blockers after a year, rather than continuing for the rest of their lives, according to a clinical trial from South Korea.
Researchers enrolled 2,540 patients who had recovered from heart disease and were given beta-blockers such as metoprolol, sold under the brand names Lopressor and atenolol.
Those who stopped taking the medication after at least 12 months had the same risk of death, more heart attacks, or hospitalizations for nausea as those who continued to take it, researchers reported at the American College of Cardiology scientific meeting in New Orleans.
Beta-blockers, which lower heart rate and blood pressure, have long been a mainstay of treatment to reduce the chance of subsequent heart attacks after a heart attack.
However, many studies confirming their benefits were carried out decades ago, before modern methods and drugs were available.
“In practice, for stable patients of several years suffering from heart disease, the cessation can be taken by making shared decisions and by monitoring blood pressure and heart rate,” study leader Dr. Joo-Yong Hahn of Samsung Medical Center in Seoul said in a statement.
In patients with beta-blocker-related side effects – fatigue, dizziness, bradycardia, hypotension – the issue of smoking cessation is even stronger.
Because all patients were enrolled in South Korea and very few women participated, the results may not be broadly applicable, the researchers noted.
A COMMON WAY TO DETERMINE THE CONTEXT OF COVID
The widely used, inexpensive antidepressant fluvoxamine significantly improved fatigue and quality of life among adults with chronic COVID in a clinical trial, researchers report.
The trial enrolled 399 adults in Brazil with fatigue lasting at least 90 days after confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection. Participants were assigned to receive fluvoxamine, the common diabetes drug metformin, or a placebo for 60 days.
“Fluvoxamine has shown consistent and meaningful benefits, and now that it is widely used and well understood, it has clear potential for clinical use,” study leader Edward Mills of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario said in a statement.
Metformin has been shown to reduce the risk of long-term COVID when taken during an acute infection, but it did not help the people in this study with long-term fatigue symptoms of COVID.
“This trial gives doctors their first strong evidence for a drug that helps reduce chronic fatigue in COVID,” study co-author Jamie Forrest of the University of British Columbia said in a statement.
Professor Christiaan Vinkers of the Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam, who was not involved in this study, said that the findings should be interpreted with caution because patients give specific reports about their symptoms and the study focused on fatigue and did not evaluate other long-term aspects of COVID.
“The results are promising, but replication is essential, preferably in broader groups of patients and results that reflect the full range of long-term COVID,” said Vinkers.
Narrative by Nancy Lapid; Edited by Bill Berkrot
Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
#Health #Trends #Genetic #testing #improves #treatment #survival #Black #breast #cancer #patients