Europa Donna Educational Event “30 Years of Educating Breast Cancer Advocates”
Some 87 Europa Donna members from 28 countries stayed on after EBCC14 to attend Europa Donna’s Educational Event on 23 March, which brought key speakers from the conference to sum up the main findings and messages presented at the conference for the advocates present.
In the morning, Matteo Lambertini, Isabel Rubio and Orit Kaidar-Person provided our advocates with super useful take away messages from the key sessions of EBCC14, reporting the findings of the latest research on early and metastatic breast cancer treatment, discussing the latest trends in surgery, primarily regarding de-escalating/optimising therapy, and highlighting the need for multidisciplinary teamwork, particularly between surgeons and radiologists. Attendees were presented with findings of studies aimed at omitting radiotherapy after lumpectomy in low-risk tumours: “If you don’t need it, I don’t give it” appears to be the trend.
Ines-Maria Vaz Duarte Luis and Ximena Montano spoke about breast cancer research and the importance of patient advocates’ involvement throughout the clinical trial process. Inez underlined the advantage of co-creation in research, where patients are partners through the process. Neil Bertelsen, spoke about patient involvement in HTA on a national level and also introduced the new EU HTA Regulation that will come into effect in January 2025, and Tanja Spanic described how Europa Donna Slovenia interacts with HTA in her country.
The afternoon saw Anne May, head of the project for the PREFERABLE clinical trial, reporting the results of the study, in which Europa Donna is a partner. It was found that twice-weekly supervised exercise sessions involving balance, resistance and aerobic exercises for 9 months notably decreased fatigue and improved quality of life scores in people with MBC.
Antonio Di Meglio also spoke about the benefits of exercise in breast cancer prevention, during and after therapy. He suggested that physicians should take the lead in prescribing exercise programmes for their patients because it has been shown that exercise adherence is higher when advice comes from the doctor.
Finally, Christine Boers-Doets described and demonstrated some techniques to prevent or decrease side effects of the various breast cancer therapies and explained that some 80% of side effects can be managed by the patient herself.
During the Europa Donna Educational Event, advocates had two opportunities to put the exercise data into practice with guided sessions of Pilates and Body Mind connection.
