The Oncotype DX breast cancer test was originally developed for use in certain groups of women with early-stage, invasive breast cancer, but it’s now possible to also use the test to generate a DCIS recurrence score—an indicator of the likelihood that DCIS will recur after treatment with lumpectomy alone.

Results from a study of the DCIS score were recently presented at the 34th Annual CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.3 The study involved 327 women with DCIS who had participated in an earlier clinical trial of DCIS treatment. The women had been treated with lumpectomy but had not received radiation therapy.

Three-quarters of the patients had a low risk of recurrence based on the DCIS score. For these women the likelihood of any kind of local recurrence (either DCIS or invasive breast cancer) was 12 percent, and likelihood of a recurrence that involved invasive breast cancer was 5 percent. By comparison, among women with a high risk of recurrence based on the DCIS score, the likelihood of any kind of local recurrence was 27 percent, and the likelihood of a recurrence that involved invasive breast cancer was 19 percent.

These results suggest that the Oncotype DX DCIS score provides information about the risk of recurrence after breast-conserving surgery for DCIS. This information could help guide decisions about the need for postoperative radiation therapy following treatment with lumpectomy. Research in genomics is expanding at a rapid rate and will have a profound effect on many aspects of disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Diseases such as cancer are remarkably complex; genomics provides researchers and physicians with tools to explore and address these complexities and help individualize treatment decisions.

Learn more: Oncotype DX Breast DCIS Score