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A BETTER PROGNOSIS Survival rates among breast cancer patients are rising dramatically, in large part due to more personalized treatment plans.
ILLUSTRATION: GETTY IMAGES/EVERYTHING BAGEL
By Nancy Hubbard Byron
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reast cancer deaths in the U.S. have dropped 42 percent since 1989, according to the National Cancer Institute, and five-year relative survival rates have risen above 90 percent in that same timeframe. “That’s mostly due to earlier diagnosis and better treatments,” says Dr. Margaret Gatti-Mays, medical oncologist and researcher with the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute. “We are seeing breast cancer patients live much longer now,” agrees Dr. Shabana Dewani, partner and physician
with Columbus Oncology and Hematology Associates. Despite the good news, breast cancer is still expected to be the most common cancer diagnosed in women during 2022, according to the American Cancer Society, with an estimated 287,850 new cases this year alone. It’s so common, in fact, that “one in eight women will have it in their lifetimes,” Gatti-Mays says. That’s why early detection and personalized treatment plans are so vital. “Outcomes are always better when a patient has an individualized plan,” says Dr. Jeanna Knoble, managing partner
with the Mark H. Zangmeister Cancer Center and a medical oncologist/hematologist with a focus on breast cancer. “Years ago, it was chemo, chemo, chemo. Everybody got chemo,” Dewani says. “Now it’s looking at all the details, not just the size or the location of the tumor. We could have 10 patients whose tumors look exactly the same under the microscope, but they behave very differently. Now we can look into the genes within the tumor—the gene biology—that tells us how it’s likely to behave. What’s driving this tumor, what’s in this tumor—that’s how we’re picking treatments now.” OCTOBER 2022 COLUMBUS MONTHLY
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