News

Please join the department in congratulating Laura Horst Rosenberger, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery in the Division of Surgical Oncology, whose abstract has been accepted by the Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) for presentation at the 72nd Annual Cancer Symposium.

Dr. Rosenberger will present her abstract, “Axillary Lymph Node Dissection in Node-Positive Breast Cancer: Are 10-Nodes Adequate and When is Enough, Enough?” during the Breast Parallel Session of the symposium. Abstracts were reviewed and accepted by a blind peer-review program committee.  

Photo: Dara Schoffner (Women of Spirit), Margie Scott (Cancer Survivor Support Ministry), Gayathri Devi (Duke), and Gwendolyn Villines (Women of Spirit)

Even well-insured women experienced financial toxicity associated with cancer care

Even when they had good health insurance coverage, women with breast cancer reported having financial worries related to their care, and the vast majority said they preferred to know about treatment costs at the time of diagnosis.

The findings from a study by Duke Cancer Institute researchers highlight the importance of considering medical costs as women face breast cancer treatment decisions.

Congratulations to Anjuli Gupta, MD, Breast Surgery Fellow, who will be presenting on "Breast Surgery: Adjuvant Chemotherapy Guided by a 21-Gene Expression Assay in Breast Cancer" during the 2018 Association of Women Surgeons (AWS) Annual Conference. Dr. Gupta will be presenting during the Landmark Papers in Surgery Scientific Session, in which participants discuss not their own original research, but instead influential works in surgery that have been published in the last year. Dr. Gupta is mentored by Oluwadamilola Fayanju, MD, MA.

Dr. Nina Tamirisa, Fellow in Breast Surgical Oncology, has been awarded a Conquer Cancer Merit Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).

Shelley Hwang, MD, MPH, Vice Chair of Research and Chief of Breast Surgery, has been accepted as a member of the 2018–2019 class of fellows in the Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) Program.

The Section of Breast Surgery in the Division of Advanced Oncologic and Gastrointestinal Surgery has 5 abstracts accepted for oral or poster presentation at the Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) Annual Meeting next month in Chicago. The abstracts materialized from the Duke Breast Clinical Outcomes Meeting, a weekly meeting created by Dr.

For Rachel A. Greenup, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor, Division of Advanced Oncologic and Gastrointestinal Surgery, understanding how the cost of treatment impacts women with breast cancer is paramount to her research. Dr. Greenup has been selected to present her latest research abstract, “The Financial Burden of Breast Cancer Treatment,” at the annual Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) meeting in October. 

Study finds little survival benefit and high costs from the preventive procedure

Mutations in the BRCA gene correspond to a higher lifetime risk of developing breast and ovarian cancers, and many women who carry these mutations consider undergoing mastectomy or removal of the ovaries and fallopian tubes as preventive measures.

Study Provides New Insights Into 3D Imaging and Targeting Tumor Emboli in Patients with Inflammatory Breast Cancer

Duke researchers have found that a drug used for alcohol abuse reduces the formation of tumor emboli in inflammatory breast cancer (IBC), one of the most lethal types of breast cancer. Current barriers to the successful treatment of IBC include the presence and frequent infiltration of tumor cell clusters, termed tumor emboli, within the breast parenchyma and lymphatics.