For years, doctors have pumped women full of toxic chemicals in order to treat breast cancer and other cancers.  Chemotherapy has long been considered one of the best ways to rid a patient’s body of cancerous cells.  Unfortunately, this cancer treatment comes with loads of possible adverse effects, as these destructive chemicals can also wreak havoc on the healthy cells in the body.  New guidelines, adopted in Europe and unveiled recently at a medical conference in Texas, may result in far fewer women having to undergo chemotherapy to treat breast cancer. 

“In the past, we made all decisions based on how big the tumor was and whether the lymph nodes were involved.  If you had a lot of cancer, you got treated one way, and of you had a little cancer you were treated another way,” says Dr. Eric Weiner of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Center.  New medical advice is to choose a treatment based on the breast cancer patient’s particular type of tumor. 

According to new guidelines, the most important factor in choosing breast cancer treatment is hormone status—whether a tumor’s growth is contingent upon estrogen or progesterone.  Hormone-based treatments are now believed to be better treatments to chemo in many cases.  According to Dr. William Gradishar of Chicago’s Northwestern University, doctors have been over-treating a vast majority of women with breast cancer by using chemotherapy. 

According to medical studies, only 15 percent of those who receive chemo after tumor removal actually benefit from this breast cancer treatment.  One-quarter of all breast cancer patients actually get worse after chemo.  A majority of breast cancer patients do not benefit from chemotherapy at all. 

According to Dr. Robert Carlson at Sanford University, who led the guideline-writing group in the US, “It’s not that chemotherapy is not of value, it’s that the value is smaller in women with a hormone-driven disease.  We’re trying to determine if the benefit is so small that we should not be recommending chemotherapy.”

Doctors are learning that breast cancer is actually a whole group of diseases, each of which is influenced by a different set of factors.  For example, 75 percent of postmenopausal women have tumors fueled by estrogen (called ER-positive disease).  These women may benefit most from hormone-based therapies like Tamoxifen.  Women with tumors related to defective genes, on the other hand, may benefit more from chemotherapy. 

With these changes in the approach to treating breast cancer, it is important to speak with your doctor in greater detail about which breast cancer treatments would be best for you.