Regular Check-Ups Provide Necessary Support During Breast Cancer Survivorship

October 26, 2024
Darlene Dobkowski, MA
Darlene Dobkowski, MA

Darlene Dobkowski, Managing Editor for CURE® magazine, has been with the team since October 2020 and has covered health care in other specialties before joining MJH Life Sciences. She graduated from Emerson College with a Master’s degree in print and multimedia journalism. In her free time, she enjoys buying stuff she doesn’t need from flea markets, taking her dog everywhere and scoffing at decaf.

Through regular follow-ups and symptom assessments, breast cancer survivors have the access to physical and emotional support they may need.

Regular check-ups and mammograms are crucial for breast cancer survivors, but there are other aspects of follow-up care that are equally important, including symptom management for long-term treatment, an expert said.

At the recent 2024 ESMO Congress, CURE spoke with Dr. Ann H. Partridge to learn more about what follow-up care means for patients with breast cancer and survivors. She also spoke about how the partnership between the patient and the care team can help address patient needs along the way.

Partridge is interim chair of the Department of Medical Oncology, director of the Adult Survivorship Program and co-founder and director of the Program for Young Adults with Breast Cancer at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Transcript:

For all breast cancer survivors, including our young breast cancer patients, we follow them with regular checkups and mammograms if they still have breast tissue. We don't recommend doing scans or blood work looking for cancer recurrence because evidence to date suggests that it doesn't improve how people do in the long run, either emotionally or physically.

That being said, we also are very careful about eliciting symptoms. And that includes side effects of long-term hormonal therapy, which many take — and we know that people may take less of it or come off their medicines and therefore not get the benefits if they're having uncontrolled side effects or other reasons for not taking it, including difficulty accessing the drug or emotional problems taking the drug, which is surprisingly common because they remind people of their breast cancer and people don't want to be reminded of their breast cancer.

So we do a lot of work trying to help people to understand that the breast cancer is the enemy and that the treatments, while sometimes very challenging, we try to find ways to help support them to get the benefits of the treatment. And there are many other things that we follow our patients for overtime.

And the critical thing is being able to speak with the patient, have a partnership, understand the physical and emotional journey that they're on and figure out how to best support them medically and plug them in with additional emotional supports if that's what they need.

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