Breast Cancer

Two years after studies showed no survival benefit for women who underwent bone marrow transplants for advanced breast cancer, the arduous treatment has become so unpopular that researchers cannot find enough patients for studies aimed at improving it and showing a benefit. What's more, some health insurers are refusing coverage for the few breast cancer patients who do want to participate in studies of new bone marrow transplant procedures. The treatment typically costs $60,000 to $100,000.

In a drug industry sometimes accused of putting profits before patients, GlaxoSmithKline P.L.C.'s announcement of a new anticancer drug yesterday stood out: Patients cheered and investors shrugged. "It's incredible news!" Lizann DeAngelis, 43, a Downingtown woman with metastatic cancer, said after hearing that federal regulators had approved the breakthrough drug she has tried in vain to get. "This is another weapon in my arsenal. " The long-sought drug, Tykerb, developed by London-based GlaxoSmithKline partly at its facilities in Montgomery County, got a dimmer reaction from equity analysts.

AUSTRALIAN pop star Kylie Minogue has been diagnosed with breast cancer. She has canceled her tour of Australia and will undergo immediate treatment. Known in the United States for the songs "Can't Get You Out of My Head," "Slow" and her album, "Fever," Minogue is a huge star overseas - a tabloid babe known for sexy clothing and a bum more famous than that of Jennifer Lopez. The 36-year-old performer's diagnosis was confirmed this week during a visit with her family in Melbourne.

Purple Breasts, which opened Thursday night as part of the New Hope Performing Arts Festival, is the second area theater piece in as many days to search for art among the grim facts of illness and death. As with the first such piece, the AIDS revue C'est la Guerre at Philadelphia's Wilma Theater, the search goes largely unrewarded. A one-act play about breast cancer and its emotional effects, Purple Breasts was collaboratively developed in March 1989 at San Jose City College in California by a cast of four and director Daryl Lindstrom, who was suffering from metastatic breast cancer at the time.

NEW YORK - NBC News' Andrea Mitchell says that she has breast cancer but that her prognosis is "terrific. " Mitchell made the announcement yesterday during her MSNBC show, "Andrea Mitchell Reports. " She said that the cancer was discovered during an annual screening "just a short time ago. " Counting herself among the one in eight women in the U.S. who have breast cancer, she said hers was caught in the early stage and noted she was already back at work. Mitchell, a 1967 University of Pennsylvania graduate, got her start that year with KYW NewsRadio in Philadelphia.

Can acupuncture cure breast cancer? The intriguing question will be broached at a breast cancer conference Saturday at the Convention Center, attended by more than 1,000 breast cancer survivors, their families and friends. The main speaker is not an alternative-medicine renegade but Harvard Medical School's David Eisenberg, a Boston internist who has studied nontraditional therapies worldwide. He will advise breast cancer survivors on how, if they are interested, they can seek out alternative treatments - while at the same time not alienate their mainstream physicians.

One in 10 American women younger than 40 will develop breast cancer someday, and about one in 30 will die from it, according to new projections by the American Cancer Society. The 1-in-10 figure is an increase from the 1-in-11 projection that the society had given since 1980. "Every woman should consider herself at risk of breast cancer," said the society president, Dr. Virgil Loeb Jr. The rise in the risk comes from several sources, experts said. "I think one of the major reasons is that women are living longer, and more women are living to develop breast cancer" rather than dying of something else first, said Lawrence Garfinkel, the society's vice president for epidemiology and statistics.

For breast cancer survivors like Marie McCrone, the worry never quite stops. Despite a lumpectomy and lymph node removal in 2002, she feared recurrence of the cancer or the onset of lymphedema, a painful swelling of the arm that can occur long after surgery. "I heard all sorts of horror stories about it," recalls McCrone, 52, of Warrington, Bucks County. "How you might get it just from lifting a grocery bag. " Four years later, she heard about a weightlifting program for breast cancer survivors being tested at the University of Pennsylvania..

Only two days ago, Fran Visco was standing outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, leading hundreds of women in a chant: "Say it, fight it, cure it - damn it!" The target was breast cancer. And tonight, Visco will be honored back home in Philadelphia for her national leadership in attacking a disease that kills tens of thousands of women every year. Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, has been chosen by Womens Way as this year's winner of the prestigious Lucretia Mott Award.

Avastin is no longer approved for treating metastatic breast cancer because it exposes patients to dangerous side effects without any benefit, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Friday. The FDA noted that Avastin's risks include severely high blood pressure, bleeding, heart attacks, and perforations in such body parts as the nose, stomach, and intestines. "After reviewing the available studies it is clear that women who take Avastin for metastatic breast cancer risk potentially life-threatening side effects without proof that the use of Avastin will provide a benefit, in terms of delay in tumor growth, that would justify those risks," FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg said.