Early stage treatment discussion

[AlaskaAngel]

HER2+ bc, as Becky said, is notorious, and although some would probably never recur even if all they had was surgery, the chance of recurrence is greater.

It continues to be more dangerous because the medical profession continues to avoid finding out whether early stage HER2+ bc can be successfully treated less aggressively without chemotherapy but with drugs like trastuzumab and lapatinib and an intact immune system to boost that treatment.

I think patients are entitled to know, but not allowed to know. Why bother finding out, given that we have lots of very toxic therapies to add to trastuzumab or lapatinib, whether or not the toxic drugs happen to work for most or just a few at random?

In addition, so far we have talked about it only in terms of seeing the danger from the cancer itself and not in terms of the long-term risks of treatment. There are other major risk factors involved with treatment that we seem to be blind to. We talk about the increased risk of weight gain, but we don't know how to measure it. Is the risk of weight gain equal to the risk of HER2 positivity?

As a group, breast cancer patients don't yet grasp the consequences of toxic treatment plus steroids bringing about chemopause that then contributes to excess weight gain that then results in the very recurrence that the toxic treatment was intended to prevent. The problem is that our society is generally overweight to begin with, and when steroids are added that lessen the muscle system and then add chemopause to it, the danger of recurrence increases. And that same group of breast cancer patients includes aging people with other diseases like diabetes, cardiac disease, and arthritis. How will those things stack up against the "protection" of having done "more aggressive" treatment as time goes by, in terms of the dangers of recurrence through weight gain?

AlaskaAngel