We need to talk about young women and the rising incidences of breast cancer. Cure Cancer Postdoctoral Researcher Dr Kellie Mouchemore shares more on her research, the impact of family history and the importance of being breast aware.
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Oh, hello, Welcome to Extra Healthy. Yes you have tuned into the big sister podcast, Too Healthy Ish Frombody and Soul. I am the host for Liicity Haley. Often I joke to people, particularly my husband, that in my job, I'm not curing cancer, and today my guest is literally helping cure cancer. In a nod to Breast cancer Awareness Month, I'm joined by a cure cancer postdoctoral researcher at the Olivin Newton john At Cancer Research Institute, doctor Kelly Mouschmore, to share more on well the worrying statistics that more young women are getting at cancer and how much does family history play into all this. Also, she gives her tips on how to be breast aware. Kelly, Welcome to Extra Healthy. Thanks for joining us today.
Thanks for having me, Felicity.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to chatting all about this, But before we get into it, I have to ask you the question I do ask everyone who comes on this podcast, how do you stay extra healthy? Is in your life?
I try to eat well.
I'm a big fan of cooking. I love like cooking ridiculously elaborate things from scratch. But I'm also quite into running, so I did a half marathon last year, and I tried to run whenever I can.
Now, Ah, well done. Oh what sort of things have you cooked recently?
Oh? The last thing I made was eggplant capinata, so it's a Sillian dish.
Yeah, amazing and well done the marathon. I actually did the half marathon down in your hood this weekend, So this past weekend down in Melbourne. So yes, I'm all for a half marathon. I'm ready for the next one.
Oh how did you go?
I finished, and that was the main thing. Now, I went really well. Actually I wish I ran faster. I know that's bizarre, but I think I took it too slowly because I was worried about finishing and I thought afterwards, Oh, I could have run that faster. But anyway, I'm happy to be done.
Yeah.
I felt the exact same way. But finishing is the most important thing.
Absolutely. Now, before we talk about breast cancer and particularly young women, tell us a bit about you and your background and what you actually do as a breast cancer researcher.
Yeah.
So I'm a scientist, a trained scientist, so I'm currently based at the Olivia Newton John Cancer Research Institute in Melbourne. I have been working in a breast cancer space for the last ten years. I did my PhD at the Peter McCallum Cancer Center, also in Melbourne, and I finished around six years ago, and since then I've been sort of pursuing my research passion in breast cancer, which is looking for new treatments for aggressive types of breast cancer, as well as just trying to understand the biology of why breast cancer spreads to other sites in the body.
How did you become passionate about this particular area.
Well, I think I was always interested in science and biology, and it's kind of that classic story of where people in your family are affected by cancer and you just you feel helpless and like you want to do something. And I was always interested in breast cancer. But the outcomes for triple negative still we still need a lot of work to improve those. So that's really why I'm passionate about triple negative Kelly.
I have to I said this before we press recording, but often my line throughout my career in publishing and also to my husband's in professional sport is you're not curing cancer, it doesn't matter, but you actually are curing cancer. I mean, you are amazing I just we need more people like you.
Oh, thanks very much. But yeah, as I mentioned, I'm just one of many, and like if I can have even a small contribution, I'm hoping that together all of our contributions can add up to meaningful change for patients.
Very humble. Now, talk to us about early on set cancer. I mean many of us have seen the headlines, you know, especially Kate Middleton recently and other celebrities, and also people around us. I mean we all know someone under the age of well fifty and perhaps forty who has been diagnosed with cancer. So what actually is early on set cancer?
Yeah, so early on set cancer is defined as appearing in people who are under the age of fifty. And we have seen sort of a bit of an increase in early on set breast cancer in recent years, even in Australia. And there will be twenty one thousand new cases of breast cancer diagnosed in Australia each year, and of those twenty one thousand, one thousand will be young women who are under the age of forty.
I mean that's quite a lot when you group it all together. I mean everyone, we all know someone who has been diagnosed with breast cancer. As I said, talk to us particularly about the types of breast cancer that affect young women.
Yeah, so, unfortunately, breast cancer in younger women does tend to be more aggressive, and this is partially because we often see a subtype of breast cancer called triple negative appearing in younger women.
Do we know why this is happening? I mean, I know that's what you're trying to find the answer to. But why why why?
Yeah, No, it's a really tricky question, and we don't have a single explanation for why triple negative can happen because of inherited mutations, and these inherited mutations can lead to quite aggressive disease, and when it's aggressive, it can be more likely to appear in younger women. But the vast majority of women overall who have breast cancer it's not because of an inherited mutation. So yeah, it's a really complex question that we're still trying to understand.
So back to you and your research, what do you actually do, what are you doing to day? What are you trying to find the answer to.
Yeah, so my current focus is trying to find why triple negative breast cancer patients have a good or not so good response to immunotherapy, and this is a new type of therapy that kind of supercharges the immune system to try and fight cancer. So at the moment, what I'm doing on sort of a daily basis is finding samples from patients who are treated at the cancer center here with imminotherapy and organizing to get their samples, and then we're doing some really fancy techniques in the lab to try and get a picture of the landscape of what their tumor looks like, so we can find out what could predict who will have a good or a not so good response to immunotherapy. But a lot of my day is also filled with kind of administrative.
Tasks, so.
Like responding to emails, applying for research funding, going to see other people present their work, seeing updates in the space, and then also having meetings with breast cancer clinicians so we can keep our research really relevant to what their patient needs are.
What's just back to when you're in the lab, what are fancy techniques, I mean, what do you actually look for when you've got under the microscope. I'm assuming what are you actually trying to discover?
Yeah, so.
What we're mainly doing at the moment is a really advanced technique called spatial transcryptomics, and I really.
Doubt most people have heard. I've never heard of it.
It's a technology that's only come about in the last maybe five to seven years, and it allows us to look at every single cell in a tumor and look at every single gene within those cells, so we can tell exactly what gene is coming from which cell, whereas in the asked we used to just kind of blend everything together and we wouldn't know which genes were coming from where.
We'll be back after the short break with more from Kelly. Do you are you feeling buoyant about where your research is at? I mean, are there days when you think, oh, we're getting somewhere, and then other days when you feel like, oh, we are never going to cure it this well, breast cancer specifically.
Yeah, we have really up and down days.
So we'll have some sort of little discovery and we'll think, you know, we're really on our way to understanding something, and then the next day maybe things don't go so well, and we just really have to, you know, keep a positive morale and think that you know, everything we find or everything that we find is not like a good result, like it's just one step closer to finding the real answers.
Do you think we'll ever find the real answers?
It's tricky to me.
A cure means not so much that cancer won't exist, but we can live alongside cancer, and cancer will no longer either take people's lives or be a really sort of heavy burden in people's lives. So the common goal of researchers such as myself is we want to develop better therapies to help people manage their cancer with less toxicity and sort of an improved quality of life. And if you look at the survival rate of breast cancer, how it's improved dramatically over the last twenty years, I think that I'm really optimistic that will reach a point where there will be zero deaths from breast cancer.
Yeah, I mean, you're right. I mean how far we've come in particularly such a short time. If you look in you know, back hundreds of years when medicine first intercepted into the human race. Dare I say what particularly what young women? I mean, there are if you do get diagnosed with cancer, there are many concerns that pop up, like fertility, menopausal symptoms. I mean, can talk to us a bit about these and how you are mindful of these when you treat people.
Yeah, that's such an important consideration. And I was reading statistics saying that there's around seven percent of breast cancer patients who haven't yet completed their families, so infertility can be a real concern, and triple negative patients are mostly faced with having chemotherapy, and chemotherapy can be quite quite damaging to women's ovaries, so I know that it can be totally dependent on the type of chemotherapy as well as the individual, and your breast cancer clinician will really work with you to try and prevent that from happening.
But I know that there are.
Some approaches, including treatments that can sort of shut down your ovaries and put them into like a protection mode while you're having the chemotherapy. In terms of menopausal symptoms, this relates to the more common types of breast cancer where those patients need to have a treatment that blocks their hormones, so that can have really quite challenging symptoms and feel like women are going through menopause.
And this is a.
Treatment that's normally recommended for around five years after the initial diagnosis, and this is to try and really make sure that the cancer is not going to come back. But I know that a lot of women struggle with keeping to that five year treatment just because the menopausal symptoms can be really, really challenging.
So for people listening, what can we do today to reduce our risk? I mean, what are some key things that and habits that we can get into to do You do you really reduce your risk rather than protect yourself, don't you?
Yeah? That's one hundred percent true because we still don't really know what the concrete risk factors are from breast cancer. All that we can do is just try to lead a healthy lifestyle, So being active, having a good diet, limiting our alcohol intake, and not smoking, you know, the main things that we can do. But I also think that being breast aware is the most important thing. So looking for changes in our regularly and going to our GP if we can have any concerns at all, is the most important thing.
How important is family history in well breast cancer but also triple negative breast cancer.
Yeah, so you do have a slight increase in your risk of breast cancer if you've got one or more family members direct family members who have had breast or ovarian cancer. But it is really important to remember that it's eighty eight percent of women who develop breast cancer who don't actually have any close family history. Interesting, so family history is important, but it's not one hundred percent, you know, responsible for breast cancer. But if we talk about actual specific mutations that we can inherit, so you might have heard of the Braca genes. If you have a family history and have inherited the brackagene mutations, then you do actually have a much higher risk of developing breast cancer. But if we look at bracker mutations in the general Australian population, it's really low. It's only around zero point two percent.
Oh it is low, isn't it. It's interesting because I actually thought it would have been higher than that because you see a lot around the brackagen and wow, it's quite low.
Yeah.
Yeah, So if we do feel something, or what should we if we're breast aware and a red flag? What are the red flags around I suppose being breast aware.
Yeah, so there's the classic thing that we would probably all be aware of, which is, you know, feeling an actual lump in one of our breasts or in our armpit. This could be accompanied by pain or swelling, but it also could just have no feeling at all. Something that we are probably less aware of and don't think about is changes in our nipple, so the shape, and also changes in the skin on the breast, so a rash or sort of a dimpling effect in the skin. These can also be indicators. But I kind of want to emphasize that anything that is different to your normal, so what your brest would normally feel like, is a good enough reason to just go and see your GP.
Yeah, if in doubt, go get checked. That's that's my motto. Kelly, it was lovely chatting to you and all the best with your future research. Thank you for coming on extra healthy.
Thanks so much for having new felicity.
I'm always inspired after interviewing scientists, researchers people like Kelly who are hoping and actually making a difference in those lives of people suffering from cancer, and perhaps important advice is be breast aware, no your normal, If you have any question marks, if there are any red flags, get your breast checked. Anyway, thank you for listening into this chat with Kelly. If you do have any ideas for topics or themes or people you want to hear on the podcast in the lead up to Christmas, DM me at, Felicity Harley, anything else, head to bodyandsoul dot com dot you make sure you are following us on the Body and Soul Socials grob Our print edition which is out in your local Sunday paper. And until next time you listen, hopefully tomorrow stays for health You