VIDEO: Mitigating risk before, after diagnosis of early breast cancer

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[E. McAuley Fish, DO] Yeah, so I think that's actually an interesting question and kind of plays off of what Dr. Lyons was just saying. There are definitely ways to help to mitigate risk when you've already been diagnosed, but I think we should take a step back and think about, you know, are there ways to mitigate the risk of even being diagnosed with the early stage breast cancer and, you know, lifestyle modifications, like maintaining a healthy weight, staying physically active, you know, just alcohol and moderation. So, no more than two to three units per week of alcohol, staying away from tobacco products, you know, hormone replacement therapy, things like that, that we know can increase your risk of developing the cancer in the first place.

On top of that, you know, we can use those after you've been diagnosed, but we can also think about risk reducing medications for people that, you know, maybe they have a high-risk lesion, diagnosed on a biopsy, or they meet high-risk criteria based on some of our risk assessment models, like the Gail model and the Tyrer-Cuzick model. Then things like Tamoxifen, there's other medications as well-known as risk reducing medications, otherwise known as chemo prevention. Very different from traditional chemotherapy. But this can reduce their risk of developing in early breast cancer as well as, you know, you think about mitigating risk when you've already been diagnosed.

You think about the treatment plans that your surgeon or your medical oncologist or radiation oncologist has prescribed for you staying compliant with radiation. So, radiation can be anywhere from, you know, two to six weeks, five days a week. It can be hard for patients to stay compliant with that depending on how they're tolerating it, as well as adjuvant endocrine therapy. So, these medications like tamoxifen and anastrozole [Arimidex; Ani Pharmaceuticals], letrozole [Femara; Novartis], things like that can have side effects and patients don't always want to stay on those and those are the things that we prescribe in the adjuvant setting to really reduce their risk of that cancer coming back in the future. So, I think those are kind of the big things for risk mitigation.