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Tumors: Breast

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Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging

Definition

Breast cancer is a type of cancer that develops from breast tissue (National Cancer Institute 2012). Breast cancer can be separated roughly into three main groups or phenotypes: (i) estrogen receptors (ER) and/or progesterone receptors (PgR) positive (ER+/PgR+) (~75%), or so-called luminal; (ii) human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 overexpressed (HER2+) (~15%), whether ER/PgR+ or ER/PgR−; and (iii) ER−, PgR−, and HER2− (~10%), or so-called triple-negative or basal-like.

Overview

Breast cancer is the most frequent cancer among women in developed countries (Henley et al. 2020). Increasing age is the main risk factor for breast cancer, of which about 40% are diagnosed after 65 years (Biganzoli et al. 2012). However, older women are underrepresented in breast cancer clinical trials (Hurria et al. 2014), making standard management often poorly evidence-based and established wrongly on extrapolations of results obtained in younger ones.

In older women aged 80 years and older,...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geriatric Oncology, Hôpital Européen George Pompidou, Paris, France

    Romain Geiss

  2. Department of Geriatric Oncology, Instituto do Câncer do Estado de São Paulo (ICESP), São Paulo, Brazil

    Isabella Gattas-Vernaglia

  3. Department of Medical Oncology, Institut Curie, Paris/Saint-Cloud, France

    Etienne Brain

Authors
  1. Romain Geiss
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  2. Isabella Gattas-Vernaglia
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  3. Etienne Brain
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Etienne Brain .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Population Division, UN Dept of Economic Social Affairs Population Division, New York, NY, USA

    Danan Gu

  2. Department of Population Health Sciences, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC, USA

    Matthew E. Dupre

Section Editor information

  1. CNRS UMR7284, Inserm U1081, Institut de Recherche sur le Cancer et le Vieillissement (IRCAN), Laboratoire de Pathologie Clinique et Expérimentale et Biobanque, Hôpital Pasteur, Nice, France

    Paul Hofman

  2. Geriatric Coordination Unit for Geriatric Oncology (UCOG) PACA Est Nice University Hospital, Université Côte d’Azur, FHU OncoAge, Nice, France

    Rabia Boulahssass

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Geiss, R., Gattas-Vernaglia, I., Brain, E. (2020). Tumors: Breast. In: Gu, D., Dupre, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_774-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_774-1

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