New Upfront About Breast Cancer Podcast: Hormone Blocking Therapy
Good morning! Please find below information on BCNA's latest Upfront About Breast Cancer Podcast Episode 38: Hormone Blocking Therapy - Balancing Quality of Life and Risk of Recurrence We recommend that listeners exercise self-care when listening to this podcast, as some may find the content upsetting. Let’s be upfront about the side effects of hormone-blocking therapies for the treatment of hormone receptor positive breast cancer. About 70% of breast cancers are hormone receptor positive, meaning that the breast cancer cells use these hormones to grow. Hormone-blocking therapy is usually prescribed as part of the treatment as works by lowering the amount of oestrogen in the body or blocking the oestrogen receptors on the cancer cells, depriving them of the hormones they need to grow, with the aim of reducing the risk of breast cancer coming back, or new breast cancer developing. In this episode we’re joined by Debbie Packham who was diagnosed with early breast cancer in 2016 and 4 weeks later was diagnosed with oligometastatic breast cancer and has been on hormone-blocking therapy for 4 years, Ro Woods who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020 and has been on hormone-blocking therapy for 5 months and Lisa Sheeran who has worked with breast cancer patients for over 21 years and has been a breast care nurse for 9 years. We’ll hear about the different types of hormone-blocking therapies, the common side effects and impacts on quality of life, the key benefits, effective strategies and the support available to help you manage your treatment. To help us continue to develop podcasts that are relevant to our members and their breast cancer diagnosis, we ask for your feedback via our online survey. Upfront About Breast Cancer is a production of Breast Cancer Network Australia. Our theme music is by the late Tara Simmons, and this episode is proudly brought to you by Dry July.
Prosigna testing
Has anyone had gene testing such as Prosigna and how has it guided you in treatment decisions? How have you judged a low risk of recurrence and would you decline any element of common approaches to treatment (chemo, radiation, endocrine therapy?) as a result. Discussion on this site suggests to me that all of the hormonal treatments (Arimidex?) have horrible side effects that I would love to decline.
Solving a breast cancer mystery – why do ‘double-positive’ women do better?
This post is a research article; I am putting this out for general discussion. 70% of us are double-positive so this is an important topic. This research came from England and was in collaboration with University of Adelaide. But this isn't the first research article I have read about the protective nature of progesterone on breast tissue. When you read the article please ensure you read to the end where there is a notation regarding difference between progesterin (found in HRT which is not so good) and natural progeseterone which this article is about. I am post treatments and use natural compounded progesterone cream. I would however, be interested to know what you all think and interested to know what your medical teams, particularly Oncologists think about the science. Here is the article: http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2015/07/08/solving-a-breast-cancer-mystery-why-do-double-positive-women-do-better/ For the research nerds like me out there, this is also interesting: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4245250/