SPEAKERS are lining up for the fifth breast cancer forum, to be held at the royal society of medicine, London, 14 September 2018.
The programme will feature a session on the breast cancer-associated risks of pregnancy, to be delivered by Neha Tabassum, part of professor Justin Stebbing’s research team at Imperial College, Hammersmith hospital. For full details, please see below.
The conference will have a focus on the causes and cures of breast cancer, with speakers including professors Virginia Kaklamani, Gareth Evans, Mitch Dowsett, Christopher Twelves and miss Leena Chagla, and will have a separate session on pathology with the royal college of pathology.
For more details please email info@pinkribbon.co or visit https://tinyurl.com/y8j5vn94
Summary of the pregnancy research project:
BREAST cancer is the most common cancer in women in the UK, with more than 50,000 cases diagnosed each year. Amongst several breast cancer risk factors, we are particularly interested in studying the role of age of first pregnancy as a risk factor, as this is particularly relevant in more developed countries, where age of pregnancy is often delayed.
Many epidemiology studies, which follow the development of a specific disease in a big number of patients, showed that an early full-term pregnancy decreases long-term breast cancer risk, while a later first pregnancy does not confer protection against breast cancer, but could indeed increase risk.
Our project, led by Prof Justin Stebbing and Dr Biancastella Cereser, aims to improve survival rates of breast cancer patients by examining if specific changes in the DNA (mutations), which could confer breast cancer if present in a high number of cells, are present even in the normal breast tissue, and how these mutations can change in number before, during and after pregnancy.
By analysing these mutations in a big number of normal and cancer breast tissue from several international and national tissue banks, we believe that we will be able to calculate the probability of developing cancer. This will not only give us insight into how the breast tissue changes during pregnancy but will also help us to stratify patients at risk, and ultimately enable earlier diagnosis and more effective treatment.
This work is been funded by Action Against Cancer.
