Preventive Diagnostics of Breast Cancer

Primary prevention and early detection of cancer are areas of growing interest in oncology as they present the most powerful weapon in fighting cancer and the curability rates increase with earlier disease detection. Breast cancer is one of the most often diagnosed tumors and one of the biggest public health issues and importance of high-risk individuals detection has been recognized decades ago. Such high-risk individuals are candidates for earlier and more frequent implementation of breast cancer screening methods. To recognize high-risk women, it is necessary to individually investigate the presence or absence of all risk factors known up to date and express them as a single number which will present one's risk for breast cancer development. PrOnDi (Preventive Oncology Diagnostics) questionnaire is designed to detect high risk persons for tumors of 18 different localizations. It consists of 84 questions in total and 18 of those are related to breast cancer risk factors. All the anwers to the PrOnDi questionnaire are linked to certain relative risk value, connected to a specific breast cancer risk factor. As a person completes the questionnaire, all the relative risks for breast cancer are summarized according to the carefully designed formula and a person is being classified into one of three possible risk groups (traffic-light concept): red-high risk (breast cancer risk is significantly higher compared to general population) ; yellow-moderate risk (risk is moderately higher than in general population) ; green-low risk (risk is comparable to the one in general population). In the pre-pilot testing of the PrOnDi questionnaire, 59 women with previously diagnosed breast cancer were given the questionnaire. The results were very encouraging: 98, 3% of patients were classified in the moderate (28, 81%) or high risk (69, 49%) groups, and only 1, 7% were classified in the 'green' group. According to these results, PrOnDi questionnaire could present a mighty tool in breast cancer prevention, early diagnosis and detection of high risk individuals. Of course, prior to definite conclusions, a survey on much bigger number of healthy individuals must be performed, but preliminary results are very optimistic and we might have a valuable tool for the future of oncology.