Genetic Testing Is Increasingly Driving Treatment For Breast Cancer And May Actually Help Lower Costs

According to these findings, patients identified as clinically high-risk who underwent RS assessment had costs about $6,600 lower than those who went untested, $3,600 of which was attributable to decreases in direct chemotherapy costs.

The test was associated with higher cancer costs for low-risk patients. That means low-risk breast cancer patients didn’t see decreased costs after having the test. But, according to the study, there was no difference in chemotherapy costs for these patients– the increase in costs for this subset were almost entirely due to non-cancer needs, which means that if you aren’t high-risk, you won’t incur a lot of extra cancer costs due to the genetic test.

In addition, the study focused on an older population of patients, who often can’t receive chemotherapy due to their age and weakness. The authors of the study noted that as a result, the decrease in cancer care costs would likely be even more dramatic in younger populations, who are able to receive more aggressive chemotherapy.

It’s important to understand that this study is referring to the type of genetic testing that patients get when they are already sick. “We take a piece of the tumor, and we look at all the genes that help make up the blueprint of that tumor and try to figure out what are the mutations that evolved in that cancer specifically to allow it to grow?” says Dr. Comen. “And the reason why that’s important is it might make certain clinical trials appropriate for a patient– if there’s a new medicine that might target that mutation, or they may already be existing medications.”

So patients should talk to their doctors about options that might be available if they get genetic testing. “The science is evolving at a rapid pace where increasingly we are finding new mutations that may make people eligible for clinical trials, and it’s important that patients talk to their doctor about whether they have the type of cancer for which, if a mutation was found, there might be a clinical trial available, that would match that mutation to a given targeted agent,” says Dr. Elizabeth Comen, Medical Oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

The study doesn’t deal with genetic testing for hereditary genes, which you can get at any time, even if you haven’t been diagnosed with breast cancer, but hereditary genetic testing can also be an important part of cancer prevention. “Another word that you might see if you Google this is germline genetics,” says Dr. Comen. “So if somebody comes in with a strong family history of cancer… Sometimes those cancers can be linked to an inherited increased risk of cancer, as associated with a specific mutation, like BRCA1 or BRCA2, something that I think about for my breast cancer patients.”

 

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