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"Although it works, it's a lot of treatment and we treat the many to benefit the few," because there's no good way to tell who can safely skip it, said Dr. Lawrence Solin of Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia. He led a study with other researchers and the test's maker, Genomic Health Inc. of Redwood City, Calif. The company already sells a test to gauge which women with invasive cancers most need chemotherapy versus hormone-blocking medicines alone. The DCIS test uses some of the same genes. Doctors checked its predictive value using 327 stored tumor samples. Test scores separated women into low, high and medium risk groups that reflected how they fared 10 years later. About 75 percent fell into a low-risk category that could be spared treatment beyond surgery. "If it's right it would have significant value for patients," but this needs to be validated in a bigger study before the test is widely used, said Robert Clarke, dean for research at Georgetown University Medical Center. "It tells you how well it sorts out a population, but it doesn't tell you how good it is at putting an individual woman in the right group." Dr. Joseph Sparano of Montefiore Einstein Center for Cancer Care in New York, who helped conduct the study, disagreed. "Doctors are making decisions already without this information" and the test gives a valuable new clue, he said. But an expensive one. The company will charge the same for the DCIS test as its current one for invasive breast cancer
-- $4,175, which Medicare and most insurers cover, said chief medical officer Dr. Steven Shak. The company plans to start selling it by the end of the year under federal lab rules that just require proof that the test reliably measures genes
-- not that this has value for patients. The cancer conference is sponsored by the American Association for Cancer Research, Baylor College of Medicine and the UT Health Science Center. ___ Online: Cancer conference: http://www.sabcs.org/
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