33 MD for January 5, 2009

Breakthrough breast cancer research is giving one Delaware woman another chance at life. Doctors say the treatment brought amazing results in just a matter of months. Margaret Williams marks the end of her breast cancer battle with the ringing of a survivor's bell at Christiana Care Breast Center. She didn't think this day would come as fast as it did.

"I was shocked when Dr. Dickson-Witmer told me that it was gone, and this breakthrough had been made."

Margaret had a 3 1/2 inch cancerous lump in her breast. She decided a clinical trial sponsored by the National Cancer Institute was her best bet. It’s the first of its kind in the U.S., where postmenopausal patients take a daily estrogen-blocking pill to shrink their breast cancer before surgery. Doctors say, unlike chemotherapy, the drugs called Aromatase Inhibitors have little to no side-effects.

Dr. Diana Dickson-Witmer says, "We know that chemotherapy can shrink tumors down so we can do smaller surgical procedures to get it out, but chemotherapy is a rough road to go."

This is a mammogram of a patient's tumor before treatment. And after only a couple months of the estrogen-blocking pills, you can see there are fewer cancer cells. In Margaret's case, her cancerous lump disappeared within four months.

Margaret received three weeks of radiation after surgery and is now cancer free.

In other medical headlines, obesity may increase the risk for ovarian cancer. That's the finding of a new study from the National Cancer Institute. Scientists say obese women who have never used hormone therapy for menopause are at an increased risk for the disease.

Researchers think the excess body mass in post menopausal women can lead to over production of estrogen which might stimulate ovarian cells.