Sarah Harding's Fight
- English singer Sarah Harding shared with fans over the summer that she has breast cancer, and that it had spread.
- Harding had said previously that she is undergoing weekly chemotherapy to treat the disease.
- Chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation therapy are some of the methods used to fight breast cancer.
In a thoughtful post to Instagram, Harding wrote: “Thank you so much for all the messages of love and support that I've received since my last post. Everyone has been so kind and reading your comments and DMs has been such a huge source of strength to me. I can't deny that things are tough right now but I'm fighting as hard as I possibly can and being as brave as I know how.”
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Sarah’s Breast Cancer
Harding told fans on Instagram over the summer that she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer earlier in the year. And in August, she received the “devastating news” that her cancer had spread to other parts of her body. The spread of breast cancer happens when cancer metastasizes and goes beyond the breasts.
Treatment of metastatic breast cancer focuses on managing the progression of the disease. In an earlier interview with SurvivorNet, Dr. Elizabeth Comen, a Medical Oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, spoke about metastatic breast cancer’s development and treatment. “So the breast cancer is living in some other part of your body. That could be the liver, the lung, the bone, potentially the brain. And certain treatments that we give for that are targeting the HER2 receptors specifically. And the good news is, there are lots of new treatments available that target that HER2 receptor. Those may include Herceptin and Pertuzumab, in combination with chemotherapy. And those are often what we use as first line treatment, meaning the first type of treatment that you receive.”
Related: Risk Factors for Breast Cancer
Other new treatment options are on the horizon, too. “There’s other medications, including drugs like T-DM1, that’s also an infusion that we give for HER2 positive breast cancer,” said Dr. Comen. And then exciting news, in the last year there’s a newer drug called Tucatinib that we use also after patients may have had their disease get worse on Herceptin, Pertuzumab, or T-DM1. And the important thing to know about Tucatinib that’s really exciting is that there has been shown to have some benefit for patients who have brain metastasis. One of the issues with HER2 positive breast cancer is that our medications that we have right now do a very good job of controlling disease below what we call the blood-brain barrier, or so below the neck.”
Management of Metastatic Breast Cancer
Breast Cancer Treatment
Treatment options for breast cancer include methods such as immunotherapy, radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery (i.e. a mastectomy). Harding wrote that she is undergoing weekly chemotherapy sessions. Treatment plans will be determined by your doctor based on the stage of the disease, and how much it has progressed.
Related: An Overview of Breast Cancer Treatment
Dr. Comen told SurvivorNet in a previous interview how the landscape of treatment for breast cancer is shifting when it comes to chemotherapy. “A large proportion of women no longer need chemotherapy. That’s amazing. But the toxicity of chemotherapy outweighs the potential benefit. This is tremendous. It means tens of thousands of women who we might otherwise give chemotherapy to have such a good prognosis from their cancer, the chemotherapy would not improve their outcomes from their cancer and they could do hormonal therapy alone.”
Breaking Down the Major Shift in Chemotherapy for Breast Cancer
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