View clinical trials related to Breast Cancer.
Filter by:The purpose of this study is to learn more about the application of transillumination measurements in the determination of breast cancer risk. The goal is to demonstrate a correlation between non-invasive optical transillumination spectroscopy and parenchymal density pattern.
The proposed pilot study attempts to investigate the feasibility of Optical Spectroscopy (OS) as a method to quantify breast tissue composition and density in adolescent females. Our goals include: to assess whether adolescent girls can be instructed to assist with the OS measurement procedure and to determine the OS technique's ability to show breast tissue composition and density in adolescent breast tissue.
Evaluate the feasibility and safety of autologous transplantation of CD34+Thy-1+ hematopoietic stem cells afer high dose marrow ablative chemotherapy in patients with breast cancer.
Women indicate the greatest needs for counseling at the time of initial diagnosis for primary breast cancer. The time of initial diagnosis is also often the time of greatest need for information for women and their families. However, this is the time when a woman, overwhelmed by shock and trauma, is least likely to absorb information provided or seek new sources of information. An informed peer navigator with carefully trained communication skills can judge the level of information to disclose and pace that information in a way that can be easily absorbed and understood. She will also provide support. WomenCARE, a well-established Santa Cruz agency providing free support services for women with cancer, and the Psychosocial Treatment Lab at Stanford therefore ask whether women newly diagnosed with breast cancer will improve their quality of life by participating in a peer navigator program. WomenCARE's peer navigators provide emotional support, good listening skills, and information on resources for women just diagnosed with breast cancer. Having a peer counselor while a woman goes through treatment may reduce the magnitude of distress or shorten its time course. It may also reduce distress in family members, and improve relationships with medical personnel. This study is designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a peer navigator program where a woman newly diagnosed with breast cancer is carefully matched for 3 to 6 months after diagnosis with a trained volunteer who is herself a breast cancer survivor. Navigators and Sojourners (newly diagnosed women) are matched on things that are important to them. Women often want to be matched on the type of surgery or treatment they have received. We assign half of the women (by a process similar to a coin toss) to our peer navigator program and half to a group that receives standard medical care but no peer navigator. In this way we can compare the groups to see whether those matched with a peer navigator have better quality of life over the 3 to 6 month period. All women who join our study, regardless of the group to which they are assigned, get an extra consultation with a nurse specialist at a local hospital. In this consultation, the nurse reviews the cancer resources available to the woman in Santa Cruz County. This meeting is tailored to the woman's individual diagnosis and situation.
Women with primary breast cancer may benefit from participating in supports groups as they cope with treatment and the psychological challenges of survivorship. Studies have documented that these women benefit from support groups run in a university setting; however, no one has documented that they benefit from community cancer support groups. Many community cancer support groups exist and provide service to a large number of women with breast cancer. It is important to know if these groups are providing comparable service to well researched support groups. We conducted this study as the first randomized study of community compared to university-style support groups. Women had a 50/50 chance of being assigned to either a community or a university style support group based on a coin flip. This study took place in two sites The Wellness Community East Bay (Walnut Creek) and San Francisco. Two community groups were studied. i) This study evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of two community-based support group interventions for breast cancer patients [The Wellness (TWC) and Cancer Support (CSC) Communities, in the San Francisco area]. We compared them with a type of therapy developed in the university setting (Stanford's Supportive-Expressive group therapy), studied which aspects are most effective, and who benefits the most. We compared these women on change in emotional distress, means of coping with cancer, and social and family support. In addition, change in physiological response to stress was measured using saliva samples. ii) We were able to achieve recruitment for 6 of 8 groups proposed. We randomized 72 women in blocks of 12 taking consecutive women per site until we accrued 12 for each group. Of those, 61 women actually attended groups, of those 46 women to date completed at least one follow-up and were available for analysis for this report. We screened 108 women, 16 who were screened out on initial phone contact, 20 women began to go through our baseline interviews and assessments and either decided not to enroll or dropped out before we could compose a group for the second S.F. randomization. Our final two follow-up assessments for our final group in the East Bay are being conducted right now (8 month) and will be conducted in October, 2002 (12 month) so they are not available for assay or analysis for this final report. iii) We examined 5 outcome variables for this report and found that women participating in the community groups changed at about the same level over the 4 months of group therapy as the women in the Stanford groups. This was true for depression symptoms, trauma symptoms, social support, self-efficacy, and post-traumatic-growth. These analyses are preliminary until we complete our final follow-up assessments. It is encouraging for the community groups that women benefited at the same rate as they did in the well-researched Stanford groups. Conclusions for this study are somewhat limited because we could not complete the recruitment of our entire sample. However, there is every reason to suppose that community groups are as effective at serving women with primary breast cancer as Stanford's groups though they are based on very different ideas of therapy. It is important to note that all of these groups were led by therapists, and that we may have found other results if the groups had been led by peers or other types of professionals. This study reduces the human and economic cost of breast cancer in California by validating community groups usually offered free to women with breast cancer.
The major goal of this project is to test the feasibility and acceptability of using videoconferencing to provide support groups led by trained facilitators to rural women with breast cancer in northern California.
Evaluate the effects of a workbook/journal for helping isolated women to cope with breast cancer.
To evaluate the antitumor activity, toxicity, and effectiveness of the combination of goserelin (Zoladex) and anastrozole (Arimidex) in the treatment of premenopausal women with hormone receptor positive metastatic carcinoma of the breast.
The purpose of this study is to examine breast cancers that express the protein (NIS) that may be found in malignant breast tissues and to evaluate proteins found in blood and their relationship to NIS, to test whether iodide can be concentrated by breast cells to possibly treat some breast cancers with radioactive iodine, and to calculate the amount of radioactive iodine entering breast cancer cells, how long your cancer retains the agent as well as how much is taken up by other organs, particularly the thyroid gland.
RATIONALE: Drugs used in chemotherapy work in different ways to stop the growth of tumor cells, either by killing the cells or by stopping them from dividing. Monoclonal antibodies, such as trastuzumab, can block tumor growth in different ways. Some block the ability of tumor cells to grow and spread. Others find tumor cells and help kill them or carry tumor-killing substances to them. An autologous stem cell transplant may be able to replace blood-forming cells that were destroyed by chemotherapy. Radiation therapy uses high-energy x-rays to kill tumor cells. Giving combination chemotherapy with or without trastuzumab followed by an autologous stem cell transplant and radiation therapy may kill more tumor cells. PURPOSE: This phase II trial is studying how well giving combination chemotherapy with or without trastuzumab followed by an autologous stem cell transplant and radiation therapy works in treating patients with stage III or stage IV breast cancer.