Abstract
Breast cancer is the most common cancer type among women worldwide. With breast cancer patients and survivors being reported to experience a repertoire of symptoms that are detrimental to their quality of life, the development of breast cancer treatment strategies that are effective with minimal side effects is therefore required. Personalized medicine, the treatment process that is tailored to the individual needs of each patient, is recently gaining increasing attention for its prospect in the development of effective cancer treatment regimens. Indeed, recent studies have identified a number of genes and molecules that may be used as biomarkers for predicting drug response and severity of common cancer-associated symptoms. These would provide useful clues not only for the determination of the optimal drug choice/dosage to be used in personalized treatment, but also for the identification of gene or molecular targets for the development of novel symptom management strategies, which ultimately would lead to the development of more personalized therapies for effective cancer treatment. In this article, recent studies that would provide potential new options for personalized therapies for breast cancer patients and survivors are reviewed. We suggest novel strategies, including the optimization of drug choice/dosage and the identification of genetic changes that are associated with cancer symptom occurrence and severity, which may help in enhancing the effectiveness and acceptability of the currently available cancer therapies.
Highlights
Breast cancer is currently the most prevalent cancer type among women worldwide
The authors identified a genetic polymorphism in the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene, which results in a substitution of Val66 with a methionine, is significantly associated with the seral level of C-reactive protein (CRP), and it predicts the severity of cognitive depression
As a result of the unpleasant side effects of the currently practiced cancer treatment regimens, some breast cancer patients experience undesirable cancer-related symptoms during the process of cancer treatment. This potentially results in the reduced drug dosage used during treatment or even treatment cessation, rendering the treatment process ineffective
Summary
Breast cancer is currently the most prevalent cancer type among women worldwide. In 2012, more than 1.6 million new cases of breast cancer were reported, and it had resulted in more than 500,000 deaths [1]. It was cited that the heterogeneity of the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in certain cancer-associated genes (such as genes coding for cytochrome P450 variants) that are possessed by different ethnic groups could be a potential factor for the variations in treatment response among individuals [13] Such variations would impose challenges on the development of personalized therapies, where the choice of therapeutic drugs/molecules that are used for therapies and their dosages have to be tailored to an individual. Breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy normally experience multiple symptoms, which was suggested to exhibit a synergistic effect on patient outcomes [22,23] Another point of note is that cancer patients at different cancer stages may possess different perceptions on the need in addressing these detrimental treatment-associated side effects. A Danish study found that peripheral neuropathy did not affect the relative dose intensity in the treatment of their patients with adjuvant chemotherapy [33], indicating that the experience of CIPN among breast cancer patients would not affect the course of cancer treatment, despite its detrimental effect on their locomotion
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