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Breast Cancer Tumours in Young Women Have More Aggressive Genes, Worse Prognosis DURHAM, NC -- July 8, 2008 -- Young women's breast cancers tend to be more aggressive and less responsive to treatment than the cancers that arise in older women, according to research findings published in the July 10 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology. According to researchers at the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy, Durham, North Carolina, young women's breast cancers share unique genomic traits that the cancers in older women do not exhibit. "Clinicians have long noted that the breast cancers we see in women under the age of 45 tend to respond less well to treatment and have higher recurrence rates than the disease we see in older women, particularly those over the age of 65," said senior investigator Kimberly Blackwell, MD, Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center, Durham, North Carolina. "Now we're really understanding why this is the case, and by understanding this, we may be able to develop better and more targeted therapies to treat these younger women." The study examined samples of nearly 800 breast tumours from women in 5 countries on 3 continents and divided them into age-specific cohorts. The investigators found more than 350 sets of genes that were active only in the tumours from women aged under 45 years. Conversely, tumours arising in women aged over 65 years did not share these activated gene sets. "The breast tumours that arose in younger women shared a common biology, and this discovery was truly remarkable," said Dr. Blackwell. "The genes that regulate things like immune function, oxygen supply, and mutations that we know are related to breast cancer, such as BRCA1, were preferentially expressed in the tumours taken from younger women, but when we compared younger women's tumours to older women's tumours, we found those same gene sets were not expressed in the 'older' tumours." Many of the gene sets we saw in "younger" tumours distinguished these cancers from "older" tumours, but the reverse was not true. "There was nothing we saw in the older women's tumours that set them apart genomically," said Dr. Blackwell. "Identifying these distinguishing characteristics may be the first step in developing more effective treatments for these younger patients." SOURCE: Duke University Medical Center E-mail this page to a friend or colleague! To print, use this version