Strange ?--did your original surgery and/or recurrence occur during fall/winter/dark

[Lani]

months.

It seems to me just by following the posts on this board that more people are tending to recur during the fall/winter. Perhaps I am wrong in this and perhaps this is merely coincidental. But perhaps this may be because they were diagnosed in fall/winter.

Without herceptin the natural history of her2+ breast cancer is, according to Dr. Slamon, that there is a big peak of recurrence starting around 24 months and that, once they've recurred, survival averages 12 months (vs 24 months for metastatic her2- breast cancer) Now herceptin (when it works) hopefully will have changed all this, but many cancers, including prostate cancer, tend to occur in geographic regions that have less sunshine and correspondingly long dark winters(thought to be related to Vitamin D)

I am wondering, for those of you who have recurred: How long did it take for you to recur after surgery, did you have Herceptin initially, and what season did you have your surgery and did you recur in?

A study being lead by Dr. David Feldman of Stanford for patients with recurrent prostate cancer has shown that they can keep the cancer from progressing and the PSA levels low in a substantial number of cases just by
treating the patients with high doses of vitamin D (not reproducible with supplements and given in a certain time-course to minimize the development of kidney stones) and normal doses of Aleve. They are planning to start a similar trial in breast cancer soon.

Just food for thought in these dark days of winter...