Lowering Breast Cancer Risk and Improving Treatment (2:55)
Our understanding of breast cancer has changed. In this video, HealthMaker Laura Esserman, MD, director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center, UCSF, discusses breast cancer screening, risk factors and advances towards a cure.
Read Transcript
The complexity of cancer has changed, our understanding of it has changed. So, ash screening and prevention after change as well. It's most important to know that screening has value, but it's only one of the tools we have, and while it adds, to the treatments for breast cancer, to prevent, or reduce the mortality for breast cancer.
For those women with the highest risk disease. It is not going to be what allows us to get through the cure. There's a lot of things that every person can do. So, keeping your body mass index, 25 or less it's good for your heart, it's good to prevent diabetes, and by the way, it's works to reduce cancer.
My whole strategy is, let's do risk training now people say, how do you know it works? But how do you know anything works? Right what we do know, and we're already doing it, but let's do that in a more organized way. When you trying to think about what's going on in their life.
What's the most important thing to them? And maybe the most important thing may be the most important thing to someone who's coming to see you because they found a cancer when they were trying to get pregnant, is having a child. I'm excited about the drugs that target DNA repair mechanisms.
I think that some of the targeted therapies, there's a lot of these pathway targeted therapies that look exciting. Hopefully, we can have crafted a pathway for accelerated approval for the drugs that really wind up graduating and work. That means many, because you have to solve the problem.
If we want personalized medicine to be successful, we have to be aware of the bigger context of that too. We also know that there are medicines like Tamoxifen or Beloxepin[sp?], or even Exemestane or drugs depending on your age, and what your situation is, that can reduce the chance that you'll get a hormone positive and that's cancer.
One of the things that we do, is you know, these kids learn to walk and the footsteps of the person with the illness. Just don't substitute for something like that. The best physicians are still all about high touch, there is the knowledge that you bring, but more important there's the sense that you care about the person sitting in front of you, and for that moment when you're in the room with them.
Laura Esserman, MD, MBA, is a surgeon and breast cancer oncology specialist at the UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center. She talks about breast cancer prevention and screening, as well as the latest advances in breast cancer treatment.
