Jeffrey Xie, assistant professor of marketing, presented their COVID-19 global consumer behavior findings at the Macromarketing Conference.ĭr. Russell Zwanka, associate professor of marketing, and Dr. Christina Stamper, professor of management, served as co-editor of "Handbook on Diversity and Inclusion Indices: A Research Compendium."ĭr. Please forward this e-Alert to every woman you know so future IBC patients might have a better chance of catching this disease when it’s most treatable.Dr. After adding l-glutamine to chemotherapy, there’s only one way to bring better news to the IBC story: Get the word out. According to a study conducted in the late 90s, when l-glutamine is given with chemotherapy, such as methotrexate, the amino acid significantly reduces chemo toxicity. L-glutamine is a key amino acid that’s essential to immune function. Spreen offered the one glimmer of good news in the treatment of this disease: l-glutamine. Seems to me the best shot, if you’re going conventional at all, is assume metastases are already there and treat accordingly, saving the huge cost and considerable radiation insult.”Īnd here’s where Dr. Spreen: “Adding a CT scan is insult to injury – a whole-body CT, I’m told, is equal to something like 350 standard chest film x-rays…that’s a LOT of radiation (plus the PET scan radioactivity). When I checked in with HSI Panelist Allan Spreen, M.D., he pointed out that PET scans use “labeling agents” that are radioactive.ĭr. But FDG-PET/CT scans are costly and put a patient at greater danger. I found one study that showed how whole-body FDG-PET/CT exams were able to accurately detect just how much the disease had spread. And frankly, there is precious little good news. There’s no way around it – IBC treatment must be aggressive and usually involves chemotherapy, followed by surgery and radiation. Most cases of IBC are diagnosed at stage III (locally advanced) and stage IV (advanced to other organs).Statistics show that women under the age of 50 and black women appear to be at highest risk.
Most IBC patients don’t feel a lump – the breast cancer symptom they search for in self-exams.
Barbara Smith of Massachusetts General Hospital told the Boston Globe, the lymphatic vessels are “the highways out of the breast to the rest of the body.” And that’s one of the key factors that makes this cancer very dangerous: It spreads so quickly that by the time it’s diagnosed it’s usually metastasized. The swelling and redness is caused by blocked lymph vessels in the skin. In fact, most doctors don’t think breast cancer either, so these typical IBC symptoms are often diagnosed as a simple infection and treated with antibiotics. When you dry off you notice the spot is red, tender and warm to the touch. Say you’re in the shower and you feel a swollen spot near the skin’s surface on one of your breasts. So if you know the symptoms of IBC, and you tell your daughter, and she tells her friends, and her friends tell their mothers, and their mothers tell their sisters, and their sisters tell their aunts and uncles and fathers and cousins and grandparents…if that chain is set into motion by every one of us, lives will be saved. After all, IBC accounts for less than three percent of all breast cancers.ġ) The 5-year survival rate of all breast cancers is nearly 90 percent, but the 5-year survival rate for IBC patients is FAR lower – only 40 percentĢ) In the early stages, IBC is much less likely to be accurately diagnosed compared to other forms of breast cancerģ) Awareness of the early symptoms is the key to survival You might wonder why you need to be concerned about a rare form of breast cancer called inflammatory breast cancer (IBC).