Ann Partridge, MD, MPH, led the study presented at the 2022 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium which showed most women participating in the study went on to deliver healthy babies.
View Full Profile
So at San Antonio. This year we presented the positive trial, which was a study that was designed because of a really important clinical need facing a large proportion of our young breast cancer patients and survivors. Many of these women are diagnosed with breast cancer and they haven't had a child yet or completed their families and they desire to do so about 50% of women. And so we designed a study to address the fact that for the women with hormone sensitive breast cancer, they're told that they need to take 5 to 10 years of endocrine therapy and during that time they're not supported or allowed to get pregnant because the endocrine therapies can either make them infertile short term or it can cause birth defects. And so the study, the positive trial enrolled over 500 women around the world and entailed those women taking a break from their endocrine therapy within 18 to 30 months of treatment getting pregnant after they had a wash out of the endocrine therapy carrying a pregnancy if they were lucky enough to get pregnant nursing if that's something they wanted to do as well and then getting back on. So it was a temporary interruption of endocrine therapy. And the wonderful thing is that the study showed at least in the short term, that the women who interrupted endocrine therapy to become pregnant did just as well as a well controlled group of women that we matched to them from another prior study in terms of their risk of recurrence. Many also had babies and those babies appeared to be overall healthy. So the positive trial showed us that at least in the short term, and we need to follow these women long term, taking a temporary pause in endocrine therapy, does not clearly impact on their breast cancer outcomes, and it's feasible to get pregnant for the majority of these women after treatment for breast cancer.
