Research Worth Watching

Joan Lunden’s post on Instagram —#10yearchallenge —reminded me how important it is to educate women about breast density and how it may affect breast health. Basically, the breast is formed of milk ducts (usually collapsed if you are not breast feeding) that are...

The Annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium has been going on since 1977! From a one-day regional conference, the Symposium has grown to a five-day international meeting attended by advocates, clinicians, basic scientists and pharmaceutical companies from over 90...

The reading I’ve done over the past several weeks has reminded me yet again why it is critical that we go back and question our assumptions about cancer. Assumptions are rooted in the scientific process. Science is all about observing certain phenomena and then...

I was among the many who were shocked to learn that this spring the United States pushed Ecuador to drop a resolution in support of breastfeeding it had intended to introduce in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly. The benefits of...

One major problem with much of our cancer therapy is collateral damage. Not the side effects, such as nausea and vomiting or hair loss, which are typically transient but the long-term consequences of therapy, such as chemo brain and neuropathy.  Some of these...

Breast cancer becomes deadly when it metastasizes—spreads to other parts of the body. For decades, we’ve been focused on developing treatments that will keep early-stage breast cancer from recurring. Now, researchers are spending more time studying how and where...

The discussions and arguments about the use of hormones to get women through menopause were a prominent part of my early career. To help women understand the reasons for the debate, I wrote a book about menopause and hormones in 2003. Because I was questioning...

It is hard for me to believe that it has been almost two weeks since our 9th International Symposium! We first hosted this conference in 1999 and, while each year has been special, I think this year’s meeting, “Exploring the Human Breast: Employing New Technology,”...

To determine what type of breast cancer you have and how it should be treated, your tumor is tested to see if it has hormone receptors (ER and PR positive or negative) and if it overproduces the HER2 protein (HER2 positive or negative). We’ve been doing this type of...

Within the cancer research world, many scientists believe we answered the question about how cancer spread a long time ago. But here’s the thing about science: It’s always a work in progress. As I’ve mentioned before, when researchers observe a scientific phenomena...

I was recently reminded of the way we make progress in clinical research: with stories. We observe a clinical phenomenon and make up a hypothesis (story) as to why it happens—and we run with it, until proven wrong. When I started as a breast surgeon, like everyone...

Dr. Susan Love Foundation for Breast Cancer Research is actively preparing for our Metastatic Breast Cancer Collateral Damage Project Two-Day Think Tank, which is taking place November 10-11. At the Think Tank, we will present the data we have collected on the...

The amount of research now being done on the hows, whys, and whens of metastatic disease is staggering. This work has been made possible by a technological advance that allows scientists to analyze the circulating tumor cells and tumor DNA that can be found in the...

It takes a cancer diagnosis to truly understand how cancer care is delivered in this country. The experience opens your eyes to the unacknowledged deficiencies and blind spots of our current system – most significantly, the lack of attention to the side effects and...

From June 3 to June 7, I was one of more than 35,000 oncology professionals, advocates, and survivors from around the world mingling at the 2016 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Chicago. Each year, a lot of new research is unveiled at...

A new analysis by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality shows that from 2005 to 2013, the overall rate of mastectomies, combining single and double mastectomies, jumped 36 percent – yet there was no change in the rate of breast cancer diagnoses. There were 66...

Precision medicine is doing more than helping us to identify an exact mutation in a cancer cell and the drug that matches it. It is also allowing us to do new kinds of research on metastatic disease. We need this type of research because breast cancer deaths are...

Following a cancer diagnosis, patients are typically offered two categories of treatment: local and systemic. Local treatments include surgery and radiation, both of which might be used after an initial diagnosis or if the tumor has spread to other parts of the body....

Medical science was based originally on the idea that tissues and diseases were pretty much the same in everybody.  Technological advances have allowed us to subclassify breast and other cancers based on molecular markers on the tumor.  For breast cancer,...

Usually I use this space to tell you about some new molecular finding that changes the way we think about breast cancer. But after two trips to the East Coast this month to talk about the President’s Precision Medicine Project, I thought I should bring you up to date...