© 2004 by Oxford University Press
© 2004 Oxford University Press
EDITORIAL |
Déjà Vu for Breast Cancer Two?
Affiliations of authors: The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, Bunting-Blaustein Cancer Research Building, Baltimore, MD.
Correspondence to: Nancy E. Davidson, MD, The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, Bunting-Blaustein Cancer Research Building, 1650 Orleans Street, Room 409, Baltimore, MD 21231-1000 (e-mail: davidna@jhmi.edu)
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Women with early-stage breast cancer face three late breast cancer consequences: disease recurrence within the conserved breast, development of a contralateral breast cancer, and manifestation of distant metastases. Although local therapy with surgery and radiotherapy is used to minimize the first possibility, adjuvant systemic therapy may theoretically reduce the likelihood of all three events. In the absence of locoregional or distant metastases, a contralateral breast cancer in a breast cancer survivor is generally regarded as a new cancer rather than a manifestation of disease recurrence. Several small studies have suggested that a woman's second breast cancer is likely to resemble her first breast cancer. This seems plausible because both cancers arise in a woman with the same genetic, hormonal, and environmental exposures. In this issue of the Journal, Swain et al. (1) suggest that the characteristics of the first breast cancer may indeed predict the features of the