It’s a life-and-death prediction: How likely is early-stage breast cancer to spread throughout the rest of a patient’s body?
A new analysis that tried to make that call easier for doctors to predict found that a younger age at diagnosis was a strong indicator of spreading (“metastatic”) cancer.
To come to that conclusion, the researchers analyzed data from tens of thousands of women who took part in more than 400 studies in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
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What is the likelihood that breast cancer will spread?
For most patients, the risk of localized breast cancer spreading to other parts of the body was between 6% and 22%.
However, the risk was about 13% to 38% among women first diagnosed before age 35, while the risk was about 4% to 29% among women aged 50 or older, according to the study presented online at the Advanced Breast Cancer Sixth International Consensus Conference.
“This may be because younger women have a more aggressive form of breast cancer or because they are being diagnosed at a later stage,” says lead researcher Eileen Morgan, from the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
Her team also found that women with luminal B cancer (which tends to grow faster) had a 4% to 35.5% risk of metastasis, while there was a 2% to nearly 12% risk in women with luminal A cancer (which tends to grow slower).
Not surprisingly, women with larger tumors at diagnosis had a higher risk of metastasis than those with smaller tumors.
Research presented at meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
About 2.3 million people worldwide are diagnosed with breast cancer each year. Black women are disproportionately affected by more aggressive subtypes of breast cancer. This is the first study to examine how many of these patients developed advanced breast cancer, the researchers said in a meeting news release.
“Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in the world. Most women are diagnosed when their cancer is