As part of international research consortium including Karma samples, 72 new gene variants that predispose to breast cancer have been identified through an analysis of genetic data from more than 275,000 women, whereof 146,000 with breast cancer. Many of the genes lie in regulatory, rather than coding regions, and some are specific for oestrogen receptor…
One of the key aims of the Karma Project is to identify the women that eventually will be diagnosed with breast cancer. In collaboration with the Swedish mammography screening program we identified increased levels of mammographic density, microcalcifications and suspicious lumps in the breast as key factors for breast cancer risk. We created a risk…
That adjuvant hormone therapy lowers the risk of breast cancer recurrence by approximately 40 per cent and breast cancer specific mortality with approximately 30 per cent has been shown in numerous studies. Proportion of women that stop taking their medication ranges from 20-70 per cent but few studies have addressed predictors of discontinuation of adjuvant…
One of the focuses of Karma is to reduce the number of women diagnosed with breast cancer. There are several ways of decreasing the risk of breast cancer. Interventions range from increased physical activity to prophylactic mastectomy (surgically removing the breasts). The Karma Intervention Trial, Karisma, aims at identifying the optimal preventive dose of the…
Using data from the Karma Cohort, Mikael Eriksson, Karolinska Institutet, has developed a risk prediction tool that identifies women at very high of developing an interval cancer. Interval cancers are breast cancers diagnosed in the interval between two scheduled mammography screens. Interval cancers are considered to particularly aggressive cancers but are quite heterogeneous in their…
On the 15th of January, Dr Thang Thrinh, Karolinska Institutet, defended his thesis entitled ”Determinants of breast cancer risk; focusing on mammographic density”. Thang’s thesis deals with how physical activity, alcohol consumption and cigarette smoking affect the risk of breast cancer through their influence on mammographic density. Mammographic density is defined as the radiographically dense…
Tamoxifen has been used for several years as adjuvant therapy for women diagnosed with breast cancer. Tamoxifen was introduced already in the 1970s and reduces the risk of breast cancer recurrence with approximately 30%. Recent studies also indicate that use of Tamoxifen as primary prevention for healthy women at high risk reduce breast cancer incidence….
Non-invasive monitoring of tumor burden hold great promise for early detection of recurrent breast cancer. Karma researchers recently evaluated and improved exome sequencing to interrogate trace amounts of breast tumors in the plasma of breast cancer patients. “We are encourage by the results”, says Daniel Klevebring, lead author of the study. The researchers are now…
KARMA is the first study validating the performance of a volumetric breast density software (VolparaDensity) in a large-scale setting. Results of the study show that distributions of volumetric density are similar across different vendor platforms and that Volpara breast density is associated with established density determinants and breast cancer risk. Link to published article: Cancer…
Tamoxifen has been used for several years as adjuvant therapy for women diagnosed with breast cancer. Tamoxifen was introduced already in the 1970s and reduces the risk of breast cancer recurrence with approximately 30%. Recent studies also indicate that use of Tamoxifen as primary prevention for healthy women at high risk reduce breast cancer incidence….
Karma Kamera is the study name of a clinical trial at Södersjukhuset, Stockholm, introducing a new technique developed by Real Imaging (realimaging.com). Real Imaging’s 3D Functional Metabolic Imaging and Risk Assessment (MIRA) technology is intended to provide a non-invasive non-radiation, and examinee-friendly procedure to determine breast health through the acquisition and analysis of 3D metabolic…
Dr Li Jingmei, 31, received this year’s UNESCO-L’Oreal International For Women In Science Fellowship, one of 15 women scientists around the world to do so. Li Jingmei currently work as postdoctoral research fellow at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research’s Genome Institute of Singapore, but have strong connections to Karolinska Institutet and the Karma-group She…
Mammographic Density Reduction Is a Prognostic Marker of Response to Adjuvant Tamoxifen Therapy in Postmenopausal Patients With Breast Cancer Tamoxifen treatment is associated with a reduction in mammographic density and an improved survival. However, the extent to which change in mammographic density during adjuvant tamoxifen therapy can be used to measure response to treatment is…
The Karma study today passes 70,000 participants which makes the study the largest and most well-characterized breast cancer study worldwide.
[Press release, 27 March 2013] More than 80 genetic ’spelling mistakes’ that can increase the risk of breast, prostate and ovarian cancer have been found in a large, international research study within the framework of the EU Network COGS. For the first time, the researchers also have a relatively clear picture of the total number of genetic alterations that can…
In a substudy to Karma, scientists will study why it is more common among women with high mammographic density to develop breast cancer. The study will investigate breast tissue biopsies from women with low breast density and compare this with biopsies from women with dense breasts. Karma Normal is a collaboration between researchers at the…
Breast cancer has steadily increased over the past 40 years. In Sweden, one woman per hour is diagnosed with breast cancer and every six hours a woman dies from the disease. The need to prevent the onset of breast cancer is high. Therefore researchers at the Karolinska Institute in collaboration with four hospitals in Sweden…
Mammographic density (MD) is a strong, independent risk factor of breast cancer, but measuring MD is time-consuming and reader-dependent. Objective MD measurement in a high-throughput fashion would enable its wider use as a biomarker for breast cancer. We use a public domain image processing software for the fully automated analysis of MD and penalised regression…
Leading breast cancer researchers meet in Stockholm on the 59th Nobel Conference to exchange knowledge on the rapidly growing breast cancer worldwide and to start new research projects. Read more
The elucidation of breast cancer subgroups and their molecular drivers requires integrated views of the genome and transcriptome from representative numbers of patients. We present an integrated analysis of copy number and gene expression in a discovery and validation set of 997 and 995 primary breast tumours, respectively, with long-term clinical follow-up. Inherited variants (copy…