Cervical Cancer: December 2006 Archives

Chris Knutson, ANP, MN

"Survivorship medicine" is becoming a more frequent challenge for practitioners of all specialties. Women cancer survivors who make their way back into "routine" care following cancer treatment have questions and concerns that could hardly be considered routine. Some will ultimately be cured. Some will deal with cancer's chronicity. All of them find their lives forever changed by cancer.

Michael Krychman, MD, Co-Director of the Sexual Medicine Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, recently spoke of the reproductive and sexual concerns of women with cancer. He reminds his patients that "you may survive this illness but your life will never, ever be the same." Helping patients come to grips with that concept and making accommodations to enhance or preserve sexual functioning and fertility are increasingly frequent and critical components of cancer care.

Breast cancer could be sexually transmitted, says a researcher who has found the same virus that causes cervical cancer in breast cancer tumours from Australian women.

Emeritus Professor James Lawson of the University of New South Wales and colleagues have found the same form of the human papillomavirus (HPV) associated with cervical cancer in almost half the breast tumour samples they tested.

It's the first study of its kind in Australia, although international studies have also found cervical cancer-related HPV in breast cancer cells.