Regular Check-Ups Provide Necessary Support During Breast Cancer Survivorship

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.

For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.