Answers Wanted
“Answers Wanted” is a BCA public education campaign that focuses on crucial questions about breast cancer that remain unanswered, despite 20 years of breast cancer awareness and billions of dollars in research. Find out more and take action.
Key Unanswered Questions
- Who needs treatment and who doesn't: which "breast cancers" will never become life threatening?
- How can we more effectively and less toxically treat metastatic disease and how can we prevent aggressive breast cancers from becoming metastatic?
- What scientific tools can be developed that will help make the link between information about environmental exposures and health?
- Why do different racial and ethnic groups have different breast cancer incidence and mortality rates, and what can be done to successfully address those differences?
Background
Currently, there are more than 30 federal agencies and hundreds of foundations, pharmaceutical, and biotech companies conducting or funding research, but few—if any—are working together. In spite of all the research and fundraising, we still don’t have answers to key questions in breast cancer.
More than two million U.S. women are living with breast cancer. A woman’s lifetime risk of the disease is now one in eight. How to prevent the disease is still unknown.
At the federal level alone, many different agencies are funding breast cancer research, including the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Many states have their own research programs, and there are a number of private agencies, including the American Cancer Society, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, that also fund research.
There is also funding from for-profit companies like Avon, Revlon, and Estee Lauder. And the pharmaceutical companies are also conducting breast cancer research.
The problem is that no one knows how much is spent each year on breast cancer research, and no coordination exists among these funding sources and research centers. And to the extent that research is funded, it is frequently funded in increments that prohibit scientists from pursuing answers to questions that require long-term studies.
Most women diagnosed with breast cancer today face essentially the same treatment options—surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy—that were offered when the “War on Cancer” was first declared 30 years ago. There have been some improvements in each of these types of treatment (most notably in surgery), but these are small gains when viewed in light of the amount of money invested.
In terms of prevention, the only options available are powerful pills with dangerous side effects, and drastic surgery. The “prevention” promoted by the media, pharmaceutical companies, and research institutions are actually risk reduction measures, not real prevention. Many of these interventions create new health problems, resulting in disease substitution, rather than breast cancer prevention.
Little progress is being made because research is currently based in a hypothesis-driven model, in which well-meaning scientists and physicians decide what questions should be researched. A more effective approach would be for the affected community to ask scientists to answer their most pressing questions about breast cancer (see the California Breast Cancer Research Program Special Research Initiatives).
What's Needed
- A coordinated, adequately funded approach to breast cancer research, with an ultimate goal of understanding the causes of the disease, and the reasons for different incidence and mortality rates among different racial and ethnic groups.
- More effective, less toxic treatments.
- Outcome-driven research, in which researchers look for answers to the questions being asked by the affected community, as opposed to the standard scientific model.
An article by Ralph Moss, PhD provides an example of the type of research that is needed to answer one of the most basic questions about breast cancer treatment—who benefits from chemotherapy?
This campaign made possible in part by a generous grant from:
