Dr Ellis said the new combination was also likely to benefit all women with early breast cancer - although the clinical trials to confirm that were still ongoing.
Ninety percent of patients with early-stage breast cancer can be cured when treated only with radiation and surgery, but another 3% also require chemotherapy to stop the cancer from spreading elsewhere.
One year after diagnosis, survival for women with early-stage breast cancer was close to 100% in all six countries.
And now, the drug, in combination with the chemotherapy Taxol, allows patients with early-stage breast cancer an average of four months without their disease progressing.
Late last year, Upshaw was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer.
Since Ms. Emmerich was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer this past summer, her insurer -- one of the country's more than 200 state-regulated nonprofit "patient funds" -- has taken care of all of her doctor and chemotherapy bills.
One experiment by University of Toronto cancer researcher Robert Kerbel mimicked treating early-stage breast cancer with Pfizer's kidney cancer drug Sutent for short periods of time and then stopping.
To take one of many examples, a group of researchers at the American Cancer Society looked at 533, 715 women with breast cancer, and asked: When those women were first diagnosed with breast cancer, were they diagnosed with early-stage or late-stage disease?
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He predicts that very soon all patients with colon cancer will be tested early on for kras status in the same way the breast cancer patients are tested to see their estrogen receptor status.
In Denmark, only 30% of women with breast cancer were diagnosed at an early stage, compared with 42-45% elsewhere.
Starting periods at an early age has been linked with an increased risk of breast cancer, possibly because women are exposed to higher levels of oestrogen over their lifetime.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003, but she caught it very early.
Early cancer may be taken out with a lumpectomy, leaving the rest of the breast intact.
When she was first diagnosed with the disease, she said her ordeal had taught her the importance of early detection in fighting breast cancer and she urged other women to have mammograms.
Testicular cancer is relatively rare, affecting roughly one in 300 men (compared with one in eight women who get a breast cancer diagnosis) and is successfully treatable especially when detected early.
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