The Horowhenua Pink Ladies Breast Cancer Support (BCS) Group has had a busy few months. They have welcomed several new members since Christmas so have had a lot of new women in their local area to support.
They enjoy seeing all their members at the monthly meetings which are held on the third Wednesday of every month at the Salvation Army Lounge in Levin - normally there are between 25 and 30 women attending these meetings.
A new study has found that acupuncture significantly reduces joint pain for post-menopausal women with early-stage breast cancer taking aromatase inhibitors.
The research, presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, involved a randomised controlled trial comparing acupuncture, sham acupuncture and no acupuncture.
A combination of the breakthrough drug Keytruda and Herceptin is well tolerated and has clinical benefits for patients with Herceptin-resistant HER2-positive breast cancer.
The new treatment regimen was tested in a clinical trial on patients with advanced HER2-positive breast cancer that had continued to grow on Herceptin (trastuzumab) therapies.
Increasing the dose intensity of chemotherapy by shortening the time period between treatments may help to reduce the risk of breast cancer recurring, a new study shows.
The research, presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, also noted that delivering drugs sequentially rather than at the same time helped to reduce the risk of recurrence and death.
The Breast Cancer Aotearoa Coalition (BCAC) is pushing for the chemotherapy drug, Abraxane, to be publicly funded for women with advanced breast cancer.
BCAC has lodged an application with the Government’s drug-buying agency, PHARMAC, to publicly fund the drug for patients with advanced breast cancer.
Bariatric surgery (reducing the size of the stomach) for severely obese women could lower their breast cancer risk by more than a third, according to a new study.
The research from University of Cincinnati College of Medicine has been published in the journal the Annals of Surgery and reviewed the medical data of more than 100,000 people in the United States.
Lead researcher, Dr Daniel Schauer, says the results were surprising.
Metavivors NZ members were in full force at BCAC’s Annual General Meeting at Domain Lodge in Auckland recently. PHARMAC CEO, Steffan Crausaz also attended, as did Breast Cancer Support co-chairs Judith Shinegold and Lesley Harper, Michele Urlich from the Lymphoedema Support Network, and several other BCAC members.
A breast cancer charity says a new report that identifies a multi-million dollar funding gap for medicines is a damning indictment of a failing system and an urgent wake-up call for change.
The report by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) has found that medicines funding has fallen in real terms every year since 2007 to the point where there is now an investment gap of more than $680 million.
Researchers have discovered that women with breast cancer have far less of a particular bacterial species in their breast tissue than healthy women.
The new study, published in the journal Oncotarget, found that breast tissue in women with breast cancer contained far less Methylobacterium.
Ten-year results from a major breast cancer clinical trial suggest that routinely removing the axillary lymph nodes during lumpectomy to remove early-stage breast cancer may not be necessary.
The study was published in the journal JAMA and examined nearly 900 women diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer to find out if axillary node dissection lead to better long-term outcomes.