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Marily;
Gina has metatastic disease and runs the test immediately prior to getting each of her herceptin treatments.....that is within hours before her treatment. She tracks the numbers and should she start to see them rising over a couple of treatments she gets a booster dose.....like you have in the very beginning of herceptin. Her view is that her disease at this point is starting to develop and form a tumor somewhere and she wants to knock it out before it takes root and it becomes more difficult to attack.....that is to say you would need chemo theraphy. She is hormone negative so it is a somewhat more straightforward situation (as we hormone positives could be having a tumor develop with no increase of the her2 in our blood but rather having the tumor fed by hormones) but that is why another test should be run at the same time....i.e. the CA15-3 or others. So far she has been able to control her disease very well using only herceptin for, I believe, around 6 years. You could do a search of Gina's posts and read them.
Cathy
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Hybrid Mode
