Pregnancy-Associated Breast Cancer - The Truth Is Not Yet Known

"It's not that people are ignorant, but that they know so many things that just ain't true." 
MARK TWAIN

The banner headline on the Susan G. Komen For The Cure website homepage, "Pregnant Women with Breast Cancer Do Not Have Worse Outcomes" is unfortunately somewhat misleading. Perhaps the editor should have read the paper published by Dr. Beadle more closely. What Dr. Beadle actually reported in her article published in the March 15, 2009 issue of Cancer was:

"The lack of a statistically significant correlation between the diagnosis of pregnancy-associated breast cancer and a worse outcome does not necessarily preclude a true association."

Which is to say, Dr. Beadle cannot say for certain that young women who are diagnosed with breast cancer when they are pregnant have the same prognosis as non-pregnant women their same age. Dr. Beadle goes into great detail to explain the many flaws in her otherwise excellent study of 652 women, less than 35 years old, who were treated at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center between 1973 and 2006. Dr. Beadle was very thorough in explaining that the data, though suggestive, were not definitive. Indeed, it is too soon to jump to conclusions. We've been down that wrong road before - with hormone replacement therapy and, more recently, with daily use of alcohol - and it is not yet clear what the true story is regarding pregnancy and breast cancer; so, beware banner headlines that proclaim conclusions that are not yet certain.

In fact, young women who develop breast cancer when they are pregnant may, indeed, have a worse prognosis and a decreased survival. We've not studied enough women to be certain about this. Dr. Beadle went to great lengths to make sure the reader understood that there are still some missing pieces to this puzzle, still many things to learn and discover about breast cancer that occurs in young women when they are pregnant.

Overall, all young women who develop breast cancer have a dismal prognosis. Pregnancy may or may not make things worse. I hope that Dr. Beadle and other researchers will be able to clarify the true character of pregnancy-associated breast cancer in the near future. But at the present time we simply do not know for sure whether or not a pregnancy confers a worse outcome for young women with breast cancer.

The news media and their ambitious headlines typically try to grab for a hook that will capture a reader, but in their clamor to be noticed they often fall short of the mark of accurate reporting. We may forgive CNN for these hungry oversights for we know they are going for the sensational, not the substantive. But when the leading breast cancer foundation falls short in reporting the results of an important paper such as this it leaves all women less, not more informed. It is a disappointment, to say the least.