Do you know anyone who NEVER had a recurrence?
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Of all the women I have known and whom I'm still in touch with, 2 have died of BC (both diagnosed at stage IV) and everyone else is alive. Many are 10 or even 20+ years out from treatment.
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Statistically the majority of breast cancer patients never have a recurrence. Fear makes us forget that.
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I love this post, we all need true stories like these.
For those who are still alive, would be a good idea asking them what do they think have contributed to cancer not coming back. I dont know, things like sport, healthy diets, etc
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The people in my life would say, I pay more attention to what I eat and I get exercise, but I dunno.
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I think its the luck of the draw. My Auntie was diagnosed at age 24 in 1912. She never had chemo, radiation, or Tamoxifen. Just a super-radical mastectomy. She didn't change her diet at all. She was from Virginia, so you know she ate a lot of fried foods, red meat, cured pork, and sweets. She was heavy all her life. She didn't exercise. Never had children. So she had about as bad a prognosis as possible. Auntie died of dementia in her 90s. Never had a BC recurrence.
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I am confused every single time I read a post that says that there is no cure for breast cancer. Many people on this site say that regularly and it is just incorrect. I think it is safe to say that most of us know many people who never had a recurrence. My surgeon told me that most early stage patients are cured by surgery alone but they go ahead and treat nearly everyone further just in case there are a few rogue cells in the body somewhere. That would include some or all of these...chemo, radiation, hormone blockers, etc. I realize there are no guarantees and a % of us will experience a recurrence for reasons that nobody really understands. Occasionally it happens to those with the best prognosis but that still doesn't mean that nobody is ever cured.
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letsgogolf....I agree with you to a point. Unfortunately the only way you know you have been cured is if you die of something else, like your grandmother did. That's because with BC you can have a recurrence many years post diagnosis. So for that reason they use the term NED, no evidence of disease, other than the word cure.
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letsgogolf,
I wish I could agree with you or perhaps it's a matter of semantics. We have treatments for breast cancer, which often result in no recurrence of bc, but a cure remains elusive because there is no explanation as to why some recur nor can anyone predict who will recur. I have a difficult time calling that a cure, especially when someone can have a recurrence 20+ years after initial treatment. I don't say this to frighten anyone or cause anyone to lose hope, but the 40,000 people who die from bc each year (including far too many who thought they were “cured" ) would hardly use the word cure.
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I see way to many women on here who are diagnosed at stage 1 and throw all they can at this crap disease and then have a recurrence or worse metastasis. No DR can with a 100% confidence say “you’re cured” because they honestly don’t know. Yes, in many situations of early stage BC the chances are very slim of a recurrence, but there is still a chance. To me cured is an absolute
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I found this definition of "treatment" versus "cure":
The term "cure" means that, after medical treatment, the patient no longer has that particular condition anymore.
Some diseases can be cured. Others, like hepatitis B, have no cure. The person will always have the condition, but medical treatments can help to manage the disease.
Medical professionals use medicine, therapy, surgery, and other treatments to help lessen the symptoms and effects of a disease. Sometimes these treatments are cures — in other words, they get rid of the disease. For example, doctors treat athlete's foot using antifungal creams, powders, or sprays that kill the fungus causing the disease.
When a disease can't be cured, doctors often use treatments to help control it. For example, one type of diabetes happens when the pancreas does not make enough insulin to get glucose into cells where it's needed. Doctors treat people with diabetes using insulin injections and other methods so they can continue to live normal lives. But right now there's no cure for diabetes. So some people need insulin treatments for the rest of their lives.The good news is that researchers are constantly coming up with advances in medicine. So it's possible that a disease that can be treated but not cured today may be cured in the future.
The way I see it, according to the definition above, early stage breast cancer can be cured before it gets to stage IV. After that, it is treated for control only, because the disease is still around, settled in the bones, liver, brain or elsewhere.
It seems accurate to say that BC can be cured. After all, someone can get pneumonia and be cured of it, and then get it again years later. It doesn't mean they weren't cured the first time.
I don't know if other people see this as an analogy but I do.
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Well, we may be arguing semantics. Given the annual mortality rate for bc (unchanged in over 30 years ), and the fact that only about 5-6% of patients with stage IV present de novo, I personally, don’t use the word cure
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The breast cancer mortality rate has steadily declined. The correct way to look at the statistics is mortality as a percentage of the diagnosed population, and this has clearly declined: https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/breast.html
In 1993, there were 127.2 new cases of female invasive breast cancer per 100k women. That year, there were 31.4 deaths per 100k. The 5-year survival rate was 86.35%,
In 2015, there were 127.5 new cases per 100k, and 20.3 deaths per 100k. The 5-year survival rate was 90.55%.
In 2015, there were 3.4 million breast cancer survivors in the US, 35,000 40+ years: https://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2015/browse_csr.p...
I say yes, breast cancer can be cured. It's impossible to know if you are one of the many who have been cured, but I tend to look at things logically and according to statistics I am most likely cured. It is semantics, but the word "cured" is a pleasant one and positivity is good for us.
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I'll just leave it as a matter of semantics, in terms of using the word cured. When approximately 40,000 die from bc each year, cure just doesn't seem like the correct word to use. Cure doesn't exist for stage IV. When it does, then I'll be happy to use the word cure
https://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/breast-cancer/statistics/2015
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The incidence statistics I quoted and linked to are SEER data for invasive female cases only and do not include DCIS or LCIS, which is mentioned in that second linked article of yours (so the argument is invalid). Regarding the word "cured", I was not speaking of stage IV, which we all know is not curable.
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And that is my issue with the word cure. Until there really is a cure for the only type of bc that people die from, cure doesn't mean much.
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When we talk about a cure, we need to differentiate between the disease and the individual who has the disease.
There is no cure for the disease of breast cancer. There are currently no treatments that guarantee that everyone who is diagnosed with breast cancer will be effectively and fully cured. In fact there are currently no treatments that can guarantee that anyone will be cured. Every treatment is hit and miss - they work for some but not for all and there is no way to know in advance whether a treatment will work for you.
That said, individual patients who have breast cancer are often successfully treated and cured. These patients undergo treatments that fully eradicate the disease from their bodies and they never have a recurrence over the rest of their lives. Therefore these patients were in fact cured of breast cancer.
To complicate matters just a bit, because medical science has not yet developed a fool-proof cancer screening/detection test, after treatment for breast cancer it's impossible to know if your disease has been fully eradicated or if cancer cells remain that might one day develop into a recurrence. So it's not currently possible to know who has been cured and who will be facing a recurrence. But not knowing if we've been successfully cured by our treatments does not change the fact that the majority of us have been.
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Thank you Beesie for making the distinction between the disease and the individual. You have expressed it far more eloquently than I could have done. Individuals may be “cured”but without knowing why treatment worked for them but not others then we have no cure for the disease.I wait, as we all do, for the day when we can say there truly is a cure for bc.
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I agree, great explanation Beesie!
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I also agree. Nice job, Bessie. I guess part of the issue is that breast cancer is many different diseases, some likely to spread and others less likely to come back. Add to that the confusion about why some aggressive tumors never return and then early stage, docile tumors sometimes do. I think it is safe to say that all of us fear dealing with this again during our lifetime.
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I work with a lady, who had BC in 1989. Never came back. She had stage 2, mastectomy, chemo and radiation back in. She beated all the odds, her doctor said. She is very religious, and it helps her. She has diabetes now , but working, bored at home
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My mother in law had BC in her 50’s, lived to 88, died of pancreatic cancer and dementia.
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yup. What beesie said. Makes me nuts when someone, esp an onc, says you're cured or someone with it. How do you know?? Even dcis with o node grade 1 go stage iv. No wonder people are confused.
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my mom had triple negative, two cm tumour no node involvement in 2002. It has not come back.
I think triple negative is less likely to have a late reccurence.
Anyone know someone er+/pr+ her2- with node involvement where it hasnt recurred?
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Hasn't recurred and they died of something else? Because that's really the only guaranteed way to say someone's "cured" of breast cancer!
I'm almost 8 years out from that particular persuasion of nastiness and have no recurrence. But for those of us with ER+ disease...well, only when I'm 100 yrs old and die of trauma from skydiving or mountain bike crashing or scuba diving shark chomping, will I know for sure I was cured.
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The original question is unanswerable, because anyone without a recurrence would have died from something else. Can't ask dead people questions.
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There is no cure! Makes me nuts when anyone says that. When I'm dead and an autopsy is done, if there are no signs of cancer then I was cured.
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Rosabella, you say that when you are dead and an autopsy is done and no cancer is found, then you were cured. Well, if that happens, it means you are actually cured now but you just don't know it. That is true for all of us who do not have metastatic breast cancer.
Given that, it's simply a matter of personal preference in terms of how you choose to view it. The majority of early stage women are cured by their treatments, although they can never know it. So someone can choose to live her life waiting for the recurrence to happen, always looking over her shoulder. Or she can choose to consider herself cured until proven otherwise. The results are the same either way, so I choose the latter.
AliceBastable, the original question is answerable because is not being asked about ourselves, but about anyone we know. My aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer in her 40s. She died of an unrelated cancer when she was in her 70s. She never had a recurrence of breast cancer.
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The problem with the walk around like you're cured is you lose sight of keeping up with follow up appts, trying to stay healthy, etc the further out you are from dx. I've met a woman who understandably thought cured in her 70s having had stage 1 in her 30s and was stunned it came back. Mets all over because she thought she was clear and so acted like it because her mo said so. People take what the mo says as firm. If you're telling me I'm cured then I'm not going to be vigilant since many choose to forget the experience, like this lady. Anyone can recur or mets. That gets lost when an mo says you're cured.
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I agree that no MO should ever tell a breast cancer patient that she is cured, because he simply doesn't know and a recurrence is always possible.
In my previous post, I was talking about the attitude that we choose to take as patients. Choosing to live my life believing that I am cured is not the same as burying my head in the sand and not understanding that I remain at risk for the rest of my life for a local and/or metastatic recurrence. I would never say that "I am cured". What I say is that "I am choosing to believe that I am cured, until proven otherwise, which hopefully never happens". Huge difference. Knowing that I remain at risk, I'd be an idiot if to not remain vigilant, even if I choose to believe I am cured. I'm not an idiot.
I think we are conflating two different situations. There are those who understand that they are always at risk and that they may or may not be cured. With this understanding, you can choose to live believing that you are not cured and waiting for the recurrence to happen, or you can choose to live believing you are cured until proven otherwise. You pick your side, knowing that you might be wrong.
Then there are those who don't understand that a risk always remains. They think they are cured - with no 'ifs' or 'untils' attached. That's a problem because these women truly don't understand the nature of breast cancer and the risks associated with their diagnoses. These are the women who will stop going to appointments, get lazy about keeping up with screenings and won't remain vigilant about changes in their breast area or bodies. They may have been told by their doctor that they are "cured" or they may believe that they are home free after 5 years. Or maybe they never understood that even an early stage, node negative diagnosis can develop into mets.
Similarly, there are many women who don't realize that they can be diagnosed with breast cancer a second (or even third) time - not a recurrence but a new primary, unrelated to the first diagnosis. We're women, we have breast tissue (even after a BMX), after our first diagnosis we all have a history of breast cancer, we are getting older (and breast cancer risk goes up as we get older)... of course we can be diagnosed again. Yet every few days someone arrives here, shocked to be diagnosed with a new primary breast cancer, and often recounting that it's been so many years since the first diagnosis - which is totally irrelevant as to whether or when they might be diagnosed with breast cancer a second time.
Misunderstanding the nature of breast cancer is completely different from the attitude that one chooses to take as we move on with life after treatment, and whether we choose to view our on-going risk from the positive perspective (assume nothing bad will happen until it does) or negative perspective (assume something bad will happen until it never does).
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I think of myself as cured unless and until my doctor tells me otherwise. I also plan to keep every appointment and have every scan or mammogram (I'll get CTs every six months because of last year's kidney cancer). It's not a matter of one or the other. I can feel cured but still stay vigilant - but not paranoid.
Beesie, I was being (mostly) facetious.
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