chemo@home

As a woman I have breasts.  As a white, western, woman I have about a 1 in 8 chance of getting breast cancer.   If I get breast cancer, I really don’t want chemotherapy, if I can avoid it.   Not unless it will make a significant difference to my outcome. Until recently, knowing if this was the case, was difficult. Rarely does a study comes out and say that chemotherapy is not needed; that it does not reduce the likelihood of the cancer coming back and does not increase survival.   But that is exactly what has happened in a large trial on breast cancer patients with hormone-receptor–positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)–negative, axillary node–negative breast cancer, who would have until now, been given what is known as adjuvant chemotherapy. Adjuvant chemotherapy is chemotherapy which is given after a potentially curative procedure (in the case of breast cancer this is surgery) to mop up any remaining cancer cells in the body that we c...