Breast-cancer results of women who died will be revealed, health minister decides

QUEBEC - Health Minister Yves Bolduc said Wednesday that the families of the five women with breast cancer who died, out of 2,856 whose results were retested, would be informed of the new results.

A ministerial directive, from the provincial health department, advised caregivers not to pass on the retest results to the families of patients who were deceased.

Bolduc said, in unveiling the results of an $800,000 verification of results by Quebec cancer labs, that the directive dated back to last August.

“We want to be transparent,” Bolduc told reporters.

Asked if he feared lawsuits, Bolduc said he will wait for the outcome of court consideration of a class-action suit arising from concern over variations in testing results.

But he said the retests show Quebec has “the best laboratories in the world.”

The review of tests done in Quebec’s 58 pathology labs, on tissue samples of 2,856 breast cancer patients by PhenoPath Laboratories in Seattle indicated that cancer treatment for 39 Quebec women should change.

For 37 of the patients, hormone treatments are indicated. For two patients, treatment with Hercepton is advised.

The verification was ordered after Dr. Louis Gaboury, who heads the Quebec association of pathologists, presented a study last May, finding a rate of error between 15 per cent and 30 per cent in Quebec lab tests.

Only 15 tissue samples were tested.

Bolduc said he ordered the retests to reassure cancer patients.

André Robidoux, the oncology surgeon at Montreal’s CHUM teaching hospital who headed a committee of experts named by Bolduc, said the hormone treatments, which can last for five years, offer a 50-per-cent chance there will not be a recurrence of breast cancer and a 15-per-cent better survival rate.

Robidoux said the low rate of error in the Quebec tests was “remarkable,” adding that a 100-per-cent testing result is impossible and the results of the original Quebec tests are much better than tests elsewhere in the world.

“The first priority was patient care,” he said.

Robidoux said he does not have enough information to determine whether faulty test results had anything to do with the five deaths among those retested.

“I can’t answer that,” he said.

“Every 12 minutes a woman dies in North America from breast cancer,” Robidoux added. In Quebec, 3.9 per cent of breast-cancer patients die of the disease.

Robidoux said that 25 per cent of women who die in Canada each year die of breast cancer.

“It’s a terrible disease.”

kdougherty@thegazette.canwest.com