In honor of our 20th Anniversary year, WAR is profiling 20 individuals whose lives have been touched by some aspect of the many research, education, and support programs for women at high risk for and with breast cancer we have offered over the past two decades.6. Dr. Alfred Neugut
Dr. Neugut is a researcher at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center who has received grants from Women At Risk for research related to breast cancer.
WAR: What motivated you to become a cancer researcher? I did lab work on the molecular biology of cancer and found the subject fascinating. So, I continued thereafter in the field. Clinically, I also found cancer patients to be a very rewarding group, so the two aspects of work synergized.
WAR: Tell us about your research that was funded by Women At Risk. The majority of women do not finish the five years of recommended hormonal therapy. We are looking for ways to improve that. To undertake such studies, we need a reliable way to determine who is taking the pills and who is not—patients tend to lie to their doctors. So, we have identified a urine test that shows the presence of the horomone in urine, and the pilot from WAR is to help us assess the usefulness of the urine assay for future studies of adherence to hormonal therapy.
WAR: What have you achieved, or what do you hope to achieve, with your Women At Risk grant? To date, we collected urine samples from 90 women who were supposed to be on hormonal therapy and found that 6% were negative. So, the test does find breast cancer patients who are misleading their oncologist. We have also studied four women who stopped their treatment at the end of the five years and determined that the urine test becomes negative 10-12 days after stopping the pills.
WAR: How will your work impact the lives of breast cancer patients and/or survivors? Ultimately, we will use the pilot data to justify and direct the use of the urine test in intervention trials used to increase adherence of hormonal therapy. If we can find ways to encourage women to continue on hormonal therapy, it would improve breast cancer survival.
WAR: What does your Women At Risk grant mean to you? What does it mean to your work? The grant will be very important in setting us up for much larger grants and studies. We have already submitted two very large grants that incorporate the pilot data I described above, and thus justify the intervention trials we are proposing.
1 comments:
I cannot even begin to tell you how profoundly disturbing yet illuminating I find this post about Dr. Neugut, his research, and the fact that you didn't even call him on any of his underlying assumptions.
The assumptions behind this study seem to be that we women with breast cancer are naughty children who need to be spanked and spied upon, that we don't have the right to make our own decisions, and that so-called 'hormone' therapy -- which should more accurately be called 'anti-hormone' therapy -- is necessary, 100% effective, entirely safe, and that its benefits outweight its sometimes life-threatening risks & side effects, and their considerable impact on quality of life.
As a clinician & BC survivor, I'd like to remind WAR & Dr. Neugut that in health care, the bottom line is that it's the patient who has the right and responsibility to decide what treatment to have -- not anyone else's.
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