Guidelines Issued for Clinical Management of Women at Risk

The first consensus guidelines for the clinical management of women who are at risk for developing breast cancer have been released by the Risk Assessment Working Group, a team of leading breast cancer specialists.

The guidelines, presented at the 19th annual Miami Breast Cancer Conference in Florida, provide a blueprint for considering risk assessment and risk reduction options such as genetic testing, ductal lavage, tamoxifen and prophylactic mastectomy.

New methods of assessing breast cancer risk are allowing physicians to stratify women based on genetic and biological information, rather than just family history.

The new methods provide patient-specific risk assessment, which can help women and their physicians in making difficult medical decisions such as frequency of screenings, use of drug therapy, genetic counseling and testing, hormone replacement therapy and prophylactic mastectomy.

"Historically, risk assessment has been problematic because we lacked risk reduction options to offer women with significant risk factors," said Dr. Victor Vogel, director of Magee-Womens Hospital/University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute Breast Program. "Now, the advent of proven risk reduction measures increases the need to precisely identify women who are at very high risk."

"Newer methods, such as genetic testing and ductal lavage, have fine tuned our ability to predict which women are at the greatest risk. Getting genetic and biological information about a woman's risk level allows us to make informed recommendations about the most appropriate risk reduction strategy to help prevent the development of breast disease," added Vogel.

Other Sources: Miami Cancer Conference