If you’re a breast cancer patient who’s experiencing significant depression or anxiety, you’re not alone. Roughly one-quarter of breast cancer patients get help for anxiety or depression during their treatment. There are many reasons a person may feel anxious or depressed because of their cancer diagnosis.

Joint pain is often a side effect of breast cancer medications, especially tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors, which people are often prescribed for years. If you happen to be someone who experiences this, you know that it can range from being mildly annoying to having a debilitating effect on your daily life.

Your surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation treatments are finished.  You think you should be celebrating your return to normal.  But you don’t feel the same as you did before your cancer diagnosis.  Breast cancer has changed you in many ways:  physically, emotionally, spiritually.

Every year clinicians, researchers, patient advocates and industry members head to Texas to share the latest breakthroughs in breast cancer research. It’s a key conference to learn about new treatments or new standards of care for breast cancer patients. Here’s some of the highlights that have the most impact on patient care today:

Febrile neutropenia, or FN, is a common and potentially serious side effect of chemotherapy treatment.

Struggling with body image is an age-old tradition for women. We can be so critical in how we see ourselves. Too fat, too skinny, bad skin, bad hair…every woman has one aspect of their bodies that they do not like or wish they could change. Add getting breast cancer to the mix and all those insecurities get amplified.

If you are receiving radiation, you’ll know that there are often side effects that range from mildly annoying to severely debilitating. The self-care plan outlined by your medical team can help reduce the redness, pain, and irritation that come with radiation dermatitis.

Many women are living longer with ABC.  Finding ways to cope with cancer’s various stresses becomes critical to leading satisfying longer lives. 

The Canadian Metastatic Breast Cancer Priority Setting Partnership is a group of physicians, patients, and patient family members with the goal of identifying priorities in research by the people most affected by the disease. 

The more researchers and doctors learn about cancer, the more they are beginning to understand that there isn’t one standard approach to treating it but many factors to consider to come up with the best treatment plan for each person. New research is adding to this knowledge and instead of treating a cancer based on its location in the body, clinicians are starting to personalize and improve treatments for individual patients based on genomics.