A PIONEERING breast cancer surgeon says women such as the Conlon sisters are poorly served by the current choices on offer to those with an inherited cancer gene.
Prof Michael Baum, who set up the first breast cancer screening service in the UK 20 years ago, says choosing to have breasts and ovaries surgically removed in order to cut cancer risks leaves women making the best of a bad situation.
“I am very frustrated that this is the best we’ve got at the moment – it’s not good enough,” he says.
“We need to be able to prevent breast cancer in these high-risk women and we’ve got a long way to go before that happens. And, in the meantime, the best we have to offer for these women who have a genetic predisposition is prophylactic mastectomy and reconstruction.”
The cancer surgeon – now professor emeritus at University College London after 40 years in the NHS – says women who make the choice of prophylactic surgery are “incredibly brave”.
“This is a terrible decision to have to make – women like this are incredibly brave and to look after women like the Conlon family makes me feel humble and it’s an incredible privilege,” he says.
Baum’s own mother died in 1974 from breast cancer. She had the standard radical mastectomy treatment available at that time.
It was his experience of that which he says drove him to become one of the first surgeons to advocate lumpectomies and breast conservation.
However, he is probably best known for being one of the first cancer experts to understand the importance of the use of the drug Tamoxifen in the treatment of breast cancer.
But the surgeon emphasises that, in the case of women like the Conlon sisters, the use of hormonal treatments such as Tamoxifen are not effective.
“We are well under way to understanding hormone response cancers but the type of genetic cancers that these women have are not sensitive to hormone treatment – so we are a long way from having a true preventive treatment,” Baum says.
And he agrees that women with the faulty BRCA1 gene have a “ticking timebomb” within their bodies.
Baum appeals to others within the scientific community to focus their research into genetic cancer.
“My cry is for scientists to focus on this and focus their understanding on why these faulty genes contribute to those with a very high incidence of breast cancer,” he says.