New findings show women with early stage breast cancer can avoid chemotherapy.The question of whether to be treated with chemotherapy is a key question women face after surgery and hormone treatment.Researchers now say most women with smaller tumors can safely skip chemo and avoid its side effects, such as fatigue and nausea.The findings may change clinical practice for as many 70,000 women a year in the U.S.Dr. Larry Norton is a leading breast-cancer specialist and senior vice president of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center,which participated in the study. Dr. Norton, thank you your time.Can you just tell us, big picture, off the bat now, why is this such an important breakthrough?Well, now we know that we can identify patients who have a very good prognosis and don't need chemotherapy.So these patients will be spared chemotherapy. That's a wonderful, wonderful result.And you're able to know this now because of a gene test.You can kind of assess people's risks. And you're talking about women with what you call intermediate risk.Explain to me what that means. Yes.Yeah. Well, we do this test of 21 genes. It's called the Oncotype DX test.And it tells us a scale from zero to 100 which relates to the risk of the cancer spreading to another part of the body.Very low scores, up to 10, it's a very low chance that these patients get hormone therapy, and chemotherapy doesn't help them.We have known that for a long time.Very high scores are at increased risk of the cancer spreading, and those patients have benefited a lot by chemotherapy.And we have known that also. But the intermediate patients with scores of 11 to 25, we have not known what's best for them.
