Approximately 60% of women who have lived through breast cancer may carry a special protein in their bodies that ensures their survival. So, they can easily do without exhausting irradiation or chemotherapy treatments, as researchers from Nottingham Trent University have found out.
Millions of women could do without painful sessions of chemotherapy or irradiation, thanks to the discovery by British scientists. They found a special “survival protein” by which you can predict whether a surgery is enough for the patient to recover or not.
The researchers found out that women with high levels of this protein have weakly aggressive tumors. They also observed that they have the largest interval between recurrences and the lowest mortality within 5 years of diagnosis. Note that 60% of women have this protein (DACH1). So, in the case of breast cancer, they can do without complicated and long-term treatment.
Cancer is an individual disease, which does not have a single script for everyone, Professor Graham Ball, one of the study’s authors says protein DACH1 is a very good tool for predicting patients’ survival. If a woman can do with a surgery alone, doctors will be able to give up unnecessary and aggressive breast cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy and irradiation, which are more suitable for patients with a poor prognosis.
This is yet another study confirming the need for the development of individual treatment for each breast cancer patient. Scientists have repeatedly stressed its importance for the future of oncology.
