VIDEO: Navigating the conversation after diagnosis of metastatic triple-negative breast cancer

Editor’s note: This is an automatically generated transcript. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

It is really difficult when someone hears about a diagnosis of triple-negative breast cancer and also metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. One of the things I actually tell people first, and I know this may sound sort of silly, is I actually caution people from going on the internet to search for information. In particular for triple-negative breast cancers and metastatic triple-negative breast cancers, everything is very doom and gloom. Obviously, it is a difficult disease to treat, but I don't think it's helpful for patients to go online and then see all this literature about how refractory their disease is, how difficult it is to treat and how challenging it is. So I actually do warn people upfront that searching the internet for information on triple-negative breast cancers may be more troubling than they realize, as opposed to searching for other cancers. The other thing that I always tell them is, it's really, really helpful is to encourage people early on to keep an open mind about clinical trials because if there's anywhere that we're looking for novel agents, new agents, it definitely is for metastatic triple-negative breast cancers. So I really try to introduce the concept of clinical trials early on and tell people that this is not something that you should reserve after you've tried all standard of therapies, but it's something you should think about sooner because you may have earlier access to potential novel therapies.