There was a short article in The Weekend Australian this week about breast cancer.

It was a very unusual article because it didn’t say something like: Getting enough vitamin D reduces the risk of breast cancer.

What it was about was some research reported in the journal Breast Cancer Research 2011;doi:10.1186/bcr2901 (Patnaik.J et al)

They examined the histories of 64000 women who were diagnosed with breast cancer when they were 66 or older.

The women were followed up during about 9 years.

Only 15.1% of them had died of breast cancer during that period.
Almost half were still alive.
15.9% had died of cardiovascular disease.

This sort of research does a tiny part of the way to helping us think about breast cancer.

Let us assume first of all that all the women diagnosed with breast cancer received some sort of treatment for breast cancer. They are very likely to have had a breast operation and to be followed up with some sort of radiation or chemotherapy.

There is no control group who were diagnosed with breast cancer and not given surgery or other treatment so we can’t compare what their survival rate would have been without treatment and what they would have died of.

In this study they did not look at a control group who weren’t diagnosed with breast cancer and match them for age and follow through with what the control group died of. So we can’t compare with the normal population what difference it makes to life expectancy if you get a diagnosis of breast cancer.

These women were all aged 66 or more at the start of the trial. But that is a very open-ended age. Some of the women might have been 76. Some 86. How long you still have to live after 66 or 76 or 86 is quite a bit different regardless of whether you have breast cancer or not.

The study does not say for those who did die how long they survived.

The sorts of questions we might ask and want good answers to are questions like:

[ul]What difference in years of life expectancy did cancer treatment make?
What difference in quality of life during the remaining years of life did cancer treatment make?
How many of the women who underwent surgery experienced complications and infections due to being in hospital?[/ul]

Another question we might think about is how we value more length of life versus how we value more quality of life in the late stages of our life.

And of course we are not the only ones affected. There are also those close to us. What does it mean to them?