A Linkou Chang Gung Memorial Hospital research team said that it has observed five factors that worsen the prognosis of breast cancer patients.
Breast cancer has been the No. 1 cause of death among women with cancer in Taiwan for many years, with an average of six women per day dying from the disease.
The team looked at 1,763 stage 4 breast cancer patients from 2000 to 2012, aiming to uncover the pathology of highly malignant breast cancer and tracking their two-year mortality rates.
The hospital’s breast surgery department director Chen Shin-cheh (陳訓徹) said that the five factors that worsen a patient’s prognosis are metastasis to the brain, liver or lungs; metastasis to more than three sites; a relapse within two years of surgery; triple-negative breast cancer and the patients being aged 70 or older.
According to the data, more than 50 percent of breast cancer patients with any of the factors died within two years of metastasis, and they were two to three times more likely to die than those without any of the indicators.
The more sites that the cancer has spread to, the higher the two-year mortality rate is, Chen said, adding that once cancer has metastasized to the brain, patients on average live for a further 7.5 months, and the two-year mortality rate is about 78.8 percent in patients above 70 years old.
“Metastasis does not mean there is no hope,” he said, “patients with these high-risk factors should pursue more aggressive treatments, and control their symptoms by undergoing chemotherapy or targeted therapy to increase their chances of survival.”
He said a woman surnamed Cheng (鄭), in her 60s, was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer 16 years ago, and the cancer relapsed and spread to her liver, lungs and bones in 2009, and to her brain this year, but she has not given up and has kept fighting the disease with aggressive treatments.
Identifying high-risk factors can help doctors better predict the development of cancer and decide on treatment strategies, Chen said, adding that with new drugs being developed all the time, cancer patients should not give up hope.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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