TestimonialsThis type of breast cancer accounts for 15% of breast cancers detected each year. Aggressive, it attacks young women – 40% are under 40 years of age at the time of diagnosis – is difficult to cure and has a strong tendency to relapse and metastasis.
1er October 2020, Emilie Daudin learns that she has breast cancer. She was then 33 years old, a three and a half year old son and a one year old daughter. At the time, “Everything collapsed”, she said a year later. It was only several days later, in the anonymous coldness of a train, that Emilie understood why her relatives urged her to recommend a Parisian hospital, yet far from her home in Rouen: her cancer is a triple negative, a sub- particularly aggressive type of breast cancer. “’You hid it from me, girls”, she then mechanically reproached her sister and her best friend. But, in fact, I was told, I just went deaf as soon as I heard the word “chemotherapy”. “
The so-called triple negative breast cancer represents about 15% of breast cancers and affects some 7,500 women in France each year, according to the Gustave-Roussy cancer center. It takes its name from the absence of hormone-dependent receptors for estrogen, progesterone or HER2, frequently identified in breast cancer and allowing targeted treatments.
Today, no specific therapeutic strategy exists, in particular because of the great heterogeneity of the tumor. ” Like her [la tumeur] is very changeable, it is sometimes nightmarish to identify the right treatment at the right time ”, suggests Suzette Delaloge, medical oncologist in Gustave-Roussy.
The diagnosis of a triple negative is then opposed head on to the commonplace, falsely reassuring, which wants that breast cancer can be treated well. At the localized stage, the “Cure rates remain high, around 80% for stages 2 and 3, and even more for stages 1, explains Dr. Delaloge. But this cancer tends to metastasize and relapse more easily and it then generally becomes even more aggressive and above all resistant to treatment ”.
Particularly aggressive, the triple negative develops quickly and affects young women – around 40% of patients are under 40 years of age at diagnosis. Its speed of propagation and its target make it difficult to detect … because at 30 years old “It’s normal to have sore breasts” and “Cancer doesn’t hurt anyway”, Emilie was opposed when she worried, with a midwife, about a small painful lump in her right breast.
A second professional supported him that it was only a muscle tear, advising him to go see an osteopath, but prescribing him ” last resort “ a breast ultrasound.
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