The Other Breast Cancer

It’s not all about pink ribbons and cures. Women living with metastatic cancer have their own kind of hope.

- Lisa Haney

OCTOBER IS Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so you’ll soon be hearing a lot about the disease—but probably not much about the metastatic kind. Metastatic means the cancer has spread to another part of the body, usually the lungs, liver, bones, or brain. It’s also known as stage IV cancer. Women initially diagnosed with stage II breast cancer have a five-year survival rate of about 93 percent; with stage III, it’s about 72 percent. In stage IV, the rate drops to about 22 percent. Most breast cancer deaths are due to metastasis; it kills roughly 40,000 Americans each year.

Now, the good news. Though there’s no cure for metastatic breast cancer (MBC), it can be treated—with chemo, surgery, radiation, and, increasingly, targeted drugs. When a drug regimen is effective, a patient stays on it until it stops working, and then she tries a different medication. In January, the FDA expanded these life-lengthening options when it approved a new class of drugs for breast cancer called PARP inhibitors, which can slow the progression of the disease in stage IV patients with BRCA mutations. “This shows we’re moving in the right direction for improving survival,” says Marc Hurlbert, PhD, chief mission officer at the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.