A game-changer is long overdue in breast-cancer research—and one may be just ahead

As far as we’ve come in the fight against breast cancer over the past 20 years, the state of actionable information is, circa 2016, fairly accurately encapsulated by an old bromide that’s often dispatched to denigrate perceptions of progress:

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Here’s the late oncologist and thought leader David Plotkin, MD, back in 1996:

“I have been researching and treating this disease for more than 35 years, a period in which the public’s awareness of breast cancer has risen enormously. … One result of this visibility has been a rise in public sympathy for victims of breast cancer and a concomitant rise in funding for breast-cancer research. But the growth in awareness has had another, less desirable result: a flood of often contradictory information that has led to public confusion.”

I’ve added the emphasis to underscore the inertia. For here’s cancer researcher H. Gilbert Welch, MD, and colleagues just a few weeks ago:

“We do not pretend to present a precise estimate of either the amount of overdiagnosis or the contribution of screening mammography to the reduction in breast-cancer mortality. The data regarding size-specific incidence, however, make clear that the magnitude of overdiagnosis is larger than is generally recognized.”

A few days prior, breast specialist Gretchen Smith, MD, put the central issue—whom to screen, and when—in even starker terms: “It can be really confusing even for [women’s] physicians. It’s a moving target.”

Clearly, women and those who love them are due for a freshly steadied target.

The good news is, a knowledge breakthrough of potentially history-pivoting proportions may be in the making.

If you haven’t yet heard about the WISDOM (Women Informed to Screen Depending on Measures of Risk) study now underway, you soon will. It’s a five-year project launched last year and led by the renowned breast surgeon Laura Esserman, MD, MBA, of UC-San Francisco.

Esserman’s team is looking to enroll 100,000 women across the country. Participants will be randomly assigned to either a personalized screening regimen based on individualized risk factors or to regularly scheduled screening mammograms.

You know the drill from there.

The team’s findings may well lead to a definitive answer on whether any of the reigning guidelines should stand as is or give way to a smarter, surer, more precise approach.

“The controversy surrounding breast cancer screening has left women and their providers frustrated and confused,” Esserman said when the work was just getting off the ground. “The time has come to put the controversy to rest.”

Do you know a woman who might be ready, willing and able to be one of the WISDOM 100,000? Send her to sign up on this secure portal. She just might help make breast cancer history.