Understanding Your Diagnosis

Breast cancer isn’t just breast cancer. But rather like a family that all has the same surname but very different names and personalities. Like in all families, some are nice and easy to deal with while others may be more unpredictable and slightly more challenging to manage. This makes breast cancer a complex disease, and everyone’s experience is unique. If we understand your cancer’s personality, it helps us to decide what treatment would be most effective in managing it.

Breast cancer treatment is never just one thing but rather the best combination of a few things (think of it as a treatment basket). This knowledge has vastly improved the cure rate for breast cancer. Breast cancer is now one of the most curable cancers, especially if we combine all the right treatments and in the right order.

How do we determine a Breast Cancer’s Biological Personality?

This is why your biopsy is so important as our pathologists spends a lot of time to figure out exactly what makes your cancer grow. The main things we look at is:

• ER Status: How sensitive it is to estrogen (female hormone)
• PR status: How sensitive it is to progesterone (female hormone)
• If it has a special growth receptor called Her2Neu
• How fast the cells are dividing (growth rate) and if it is expressed in a percentage called the Ki67%
• Androgen Receptor Status: For some cancers, we may also test how sensitive it is to androgen (male hormone).