Currently, the best way to predict whether breast cancer is likely to recur is to search lymph nodes near the breast for tumor cells.
Dr. Peter Lee and his colleagues at the Stanford University School of Medicine, suggest examining the immune cells in these lymph nodes might be a better way to predict the cancer's spread.
Patients whose results suggest a presence of aggressive cancer could receive extra treatment to kill stray tumor cells.
In the journal Public Library of Science-Medicine
Within five years, 33 of the 77 patients had their cancer return.
Immune cells are sometimes known to destroy cancer cells, whose job is to keep cancer constantly under control in most normal healthy people. Lee is looking for what goes wrong when the immune system fails to control cancer.
The team looked for tumor cells and three major types of immune cells: cytotoxic T cells, helper T cells and dendritic cells.
Lymph nodes that had been attacked by tumor cells showed dramatic decreases in helper T cells and dendritic cells. Lee found they also had fewer cytotoxic T cells.
The interesting note is that the immune cell balance was off, in some lymph nodes that only had a few tumor cells, or none at all.
The imbalance was found in the 33 women whose breast cancer came back before five years.
Women whose lymph nodes had a normal immune cell balance had an 85 to 90 percent chance of being disease-free after five years. The group with an "unfavorable" immune profile had less than a 15 percent chance.
