While the name may sound like slang, the term “chemobrain” is becoming more recognized as a real experience of some breast cancer patients. The symptoms include memory loss, inability to concentrate and difficulty thinking.
Researchers from the UCLA Center for Culture and Health recently studied the problem with focus groups and in-depth interviews of 74 women who had completed breast cancer treatment. Their research was published in the Journal of Cancer Survivorship.

Many of the women in the study described cognitive changes that were both frustrating and upsetting to them. Most of the women complained about the medical community’s failure to acknowledge …read more

If being diagnosed with breast cancer isn’t enough of a nightmare, how would finding out that your breast cancer test results may wrong feel like? That’s what is happening to thousands of women in the Canadian province of Quebec.
A study, done out of the University of Montreal, had concluded that between 15 and 20% of breast cancer tests had been interpreted incorrectly and that many women may have been given the wrong type of treatment based on this erroneous test results.
It is important, however, to understand that just because the tests may have been incorrect, this does *not* mean that …read more

Speaking of breast cancer…
Previously popular treatments – i.e. big-dose chemotherapy – apparently are of no help against breast cancer.
Such were the findings recently reported by a group of Houston researchers.
A grueling and controversial breast cancer treatment that was popular in the late 1980s and the 1990s does not extend the lives of patients in advanced stages of the disease
In releasing their report on a review of existing studies, the researchers said women who received high-dose chemotherapy, followed by transplants from their own bone marrow, fared no better than patients on other therapies.
Donald Berry, head of quantitative studies at the University …read more

Woman’s health blogger Florence Cardinal told her breast cancer story at Well Woman Blog.
Florence tells us how she at the young age of 12 dealt with her mother’s breast cancer and how the process affected her outlook about cancer in general.
Mom recovered, but it was a long road. Even after she came home she had to make frequent trips to the Cross Cancer Clinic in Edmonton, a two and a half-hour drive, for therapy. She had radiation treatment. She may have also had chemotherapy because she lost her hair by the handful. But the trips became less frequent, and finally …read more

Deciding whether to get a regular mammogram?
A new review of studies offers both the good and the bad news to women facing such a decision.
The good news being that screening mammography does reduce breast cancer mortality and the bad news is that women in a screened population are 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed and treated for a cancer that, in the absence of screening, would never have posed a threat to their health.
Lead author Peter Gøtzsche, M.D., director of the Nordic Cochrane Centre (Copenhagen, Denmark) said:
“It is likely that screening mammography reduces breast cancer mortality, but the other …read more