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Dr. Susan Love spent 20 years doing breast-cancer surgery, along the way authoring "Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book," (DaCapo Press). Now in its fourth edition, her book is considered the most complete, trustworthy guide for women with breast cancer.
But for all her knowledge, Love still doesn't know how many milk ducts the average woman has in each breast or how many holes there are in a nipple or what nonfeeding breasts do.
"I know, they just hang out," she says with a chuckle. "But there's more to all this. We've found nicotine and pesticides in breast ductile fluid. We're trying to figure out if these carcinogens contribute to breast cancers.
"We know all these cancers start in the ducts. But we need to find out what's normal duct fluid first."
At 57, Love has left UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine to become medical director of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the eradication of breast cancer.
She no longer actively practices medicine.
Instead, she devotes her time to research and lecturing on dangers of hormone replacement therapy as well as new treatment options for breast cancer.
Meanwhile, her research focuses on cancer prevention.
"It's a new concept," she says. "Preventing the cancer from happening in the first place."
Not an impossible ideal, she says. Next year a vaccine will be available to prevent the sexually transmitted virus found to cause cervical cancer.
"When I was a resident, if there was an abnormal pap smear from the cervix, we recommended a hysterectomy. Just a short time ago, we told women we had to take their breasts off if we found cancer.
"It's time to get to where it starts and figure out why."
Already, she says researchers know all tumors are not the same. "Now we have to figure out how to target the therapy to match the tumor," she says.
Love also is known for telling women not to take estrogen during menopause, "unless the symptoms are just awful and then just take the hormone for a short period of time."
Estrogen is naturally supposed to decline after reproductive years end, she says.
"And there is no data that losing estrogen makes you older," Love says. "It will not make your skin look better or keep you young.
"It will, however, double your risk of dementia."
Once considered heretical, Love says her ideas "are becoming pretty mainstream" as huge randomized control trials support her conclusions.
"My goal is to do the prevention. We're on the road. We know exactly what path to take and we're going down it as fast as we can," Love says.
"We're in a hurry. Every day we delay prevention, more women are dying of breast cancer."
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(c) 2005, The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.). Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
