Breast Cancer Tumors Grow Faster In Younger Women

Main Category: Breast Cancer
Article Date: 08 May 2008 - 6:00 PDT

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A new approach to estimating tumour growth based on breast screening results from almost 400,000 women is published today BioMed Central's open access journal, Breast Cancer Research. This new model can also estimate the proportion of breast cancers which are detected at screening (screen test sensitivity). It provides a new approach to simultaneously estimating the growth rate of breast cancer and the ability of mammography screening to detect tumours.

The results of the study show that tumour growth rates vary considerably among patients, with generally slower growth rates with increasing age at diagnosis. Understanding how tumours grow is important in the planning and evaluation of screening programs, clinical trials, and epidemiological studies. However, studies of tumour growth rates in people have so far been based mainly on small and selected samples. Now, Harald Weedon-Fekjær of the Department of Etiological Research, Cancer Registry of Norway and colleagues have developed a new estimating procedure to follow tumour growth in a very large population of breast cancer patients included in the Norwegian Breast Cancer Screening Program.

The researchers applied their model to cancer incidence and tumour measurement data from 395,188 women aged between 50 and 69 years old. They found that tumour growth varies considerably between subjects. About one in twenty tumours double in size in just over a month from 10 to 20mm, while similar numbers took more than six years to grow to this size. They estimated the mean time for a tumour to double in size from 10 to 20 mm in diameter is 1.7 years.

"There are enormous implications for the sensitivity of breast cancer screening programs" Weedon-Fekjær explains. "We found that mammography screen test sensitivity (STS) increases sharply with increased tumour size, as one might expect. Detection rates are just 26% for a 5 mm tumour but increase to 91% once a tumour is 10 mm in size." The team compared their model with the previously used Markov model for tumour progression, and found its predictive power to be almost twice as accurate as the Markov model, in addition to providing new estimates directly linked to tumour size.

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Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
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1. Breast cancer tumor growth estimated through mammography screening data
Harald HWF Weedon-Fekjaer, Bo Henry BHL Lindqvist, Odd Olai OOA Aalen, Lars Johan LJV Vatten and Steinar ST Tretli
Breast Cancer Research (in press)
Article available at the journal website: http://breast-cancer-research.com/
All articles are available free of charge, according to BioMed Central's open access policy.

2. Breast Cancer Research is a high quality international, peer-reviewed journal. Breast Cancer Research publishes original research, reviews and commentaries in all areas of biology and medicine relevant to breast cancer, including normal mammary gland biology, with special emphasis on the genetic, biochemical, and cellular basis of breast cancer. All research articles published in the journal are open access; commentaries, reviews and reports over two years old are free to access, prior to this they require a subscription. The journal is edited by Dr Lewis Chodosh (USA) and has an Impact Factor of 4.16.

3. BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/) is an independent online publishing house committed to providing immediate access without charge to the peer-reviewed biological and medical research it publishes. This commitment is based on the view that open access to research is essential to the rapid and efficient communication of science.

Source: Charlotte Webber
BioMed Central