Her2 Positive Questions for Newbie

[KirstenP]

Hello!
My name is Kirsten and I am an almost 4 year survivor, who now finds myself with my mom diagnosed in February, fortunately she is now finished with her treatment! AND now 2 of my dearest best friends have been diagnosed in the past 2 months and are going through/struggling through treatment currently.

I have been unable to find a lot of good information about HER 2 Positive and what does it really mean anyway? I was not involved with this during my time with "it". I want to be supportive to them and be reassuring but I am not sure what this all entails.

I have read what I can find, but it seems so very technical. Would any of you be willing to share, in layman's terms the following:

1. What does it mean?
2. Is the prognosis of recurrence higher? *sorry, no gentle way to ask that
3. Does it tend to indicate a higher than usual possibility of other cancers occuring? *again, sorry, no gentle way to ask
3. I see a number of drugs being discussed concering the treatment, mainly herceptin. Is this a stop gap, cure, ????? Is this mainly used after the regular chemo and radiation?

I thank you all for your help. I will continue to keep all of us in my prayers.
Kirsten

[HavahJ]

Well, I can tell you what I know which isn't a whole lot! Her2neu refers to on oncogene (like a gene or type of protein) found on about 20% of breast cancer tumors. It tends to be somewhat more aggressive than other kinds of tumors but not always because your prognosis depends on so many factors (size of tumor, estrogen receptor, your age, nodes, etc.).They usually do a test at the time of surgery to find out if you have the her2neu oncogene. The positive thing about her2neu is that it often responds to the drugherceptin where other cancers do not. Herceptin is a targeted therapy which tries to hit only the cancer sells and thereby has many less side effects than regular chemo. Her2neu probably has a slightly larger chance of recurrence but there are so many factors besides her2neu. For example, my oncologist thinks estrogen positive is more important. I have never heard that her2neu makes you more susceptible to other cancers. Having breast cancer in general makes you more susceptible than the average person. I'm not sure but I don't think her2neu is important in that way. Herceptin is only one of about 35 drugs used for breast cancer and more are coming every day. I think people usually get herceptin after other chemotherapy but sometimes with other chemo drugs. Taxol is known to be a very good drug to add to herceptin because they seem to positively affect each other. Herceptin is not a cure but for her2neu people it can double the time until recurrence in early stage cancer. It also can be used to help keep advanced cancer under control.
I hope this helps. If you have any other questions or just want to talk, you cansend me a message or write to my email, HavahJ@aol.com.

[Alice]

Hi Kristen,

The her2 refers to an overexpression of a paticular protein by the tumor cells. I have read that it is not usually found in other types of cancer. If you search the web you can get more detailed info on it.The herceptin is sometimes refered to as chemo but in reality it is a monoclonal antibody.It targets the surface of cancer cells that are overproducing the protein and binds to the receptors somehow this inhibits the cell from dividing and signals the bodys immune system to kill the affected cell. Because it can target these cells it doesn't attack healthy cells therefor has less side effects than chemo. I hope my facts are correct,let me know if they're not. If I can I'll see if I get some sites & post them.

[Alice]

Kirsten Just want to say sorry for misspelling your name ( and most of my post)

Does your health provider not give you some sort on information sheet?

Does any health provider?

There are lots of related issues. You might like to read the post on of menstural cycles by Rupali which look at some the the wider impact issues in posts I made with links.

In response to your direct question I cannot give you a succint answer. I have been reading round the subject for somewhile and still am unclear exactly what HER means beyond the basics.

Maybe this link helps explain why. It is complex (and hence my conclusion that as much benifit should be gained from diet as possible see post on articles of interest breast cancer diet, and the importance of omega three and six in breast cancer).

A beginners board on this site that was mainly static with some basics would be very helpful.

RB



http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...15&query_hl=10


1: Hum Mol Genet. 2003 Dec 15;12(24):3245-58. Epub 2003 Oct 21. Related Articles, Links


Classifying the estrogen receptor status of breast cancers by expression profiles reveals a poor prognosis subpopulation exhibiting high expression of the ERBB2 receptor.

Kun Y, How LC, Hoon TP, Bajic VB, Lam TS, Aggarwal A, Sze HG, Bok WS, Yin WC, Tan P.

National Cancer Centre, Singapore, Republic of Singapore.

Recent work using expression profiling to computationally predict the estrogen receptor (ER) status of breast tumors has revealed that certain tumors are characterized by a high prediction uncertainty ('low-confidence'). We analyzed these 'low-confidence' tumors and determined that their 'uncertain' prediction status arises as a result of widespread perturbations in multiple genes whose expression is important for ER subtype discrimination. Patients with 'low-confidence' ER+ tumors exhibited a significantly worse overall survival (P=0.03) and shorter time to distant metastasis (P=0.004) compared with their 'high-confidence' ER+ counterparts, indicating that the 'high-' and 'low-confidence' binary distinction is clinically meaningful. We then discovered that elevated expression of the ERBB2 receptor is significantly correlated with a breast tumor exhibiting a 'low-confidence' prediction, and this association was subsequently validated across multiple independently derived breast cancer expression datasets employing a variety of different array technologies and patient populations. Although ERBB2 signaling has been proposed to inhibit the transcriptional activity of ER, a large proportion of the perturbed genes in the 'low-confidence'/ERBB2+ samples are not known to be estrogen responsive, and a recently described bioinformatic algorithm (DEREF) was used to demonstrate the absence of potential estrogen-response elements (EREs) in their promoters. We propose that a significant portion of ERBB2's effects on ER+ breast tumors may involve ER-independent mechanisms of gene activation, which may contribute to the clinically aggressive behavior of the 'low-confidence' breast tumor subtype.

PMID: 14570715 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

[KirstenP]

Thank you so much! I am very appreciative of the information I have received so far. The information on the web is so involved I was getting stuck in the "what I should and should not be getting" from the sites so it really does help to talk to those who have gone before us and know. Happy New Year