A new web-based tool is available at https://www.petermac.org/iprevent to help women understand their personal breast cancer risk and then act on it. It is designed to be used collaboratively by women and their doctors. Women can use it at home, print the output, and bring it to a consultation for discussion.

AMS has been given permision to link to the tool from our Self Assessment Tools  Are you at risk of cancer? page on breast cancer.

How Does iPrevent Work?

iPrevent asks women to first enter their family cancer history, lifestyle and reproductive risk factor information. Using that information, it then provides 10 year and residual life-time risk estimates; there are options to view these as pictograms or graphs. It then provides tailored estimates of the absolute risk reductions for relevant breast cancer prevention strategies, personalised lifestyle change suggestions, and tailored advice on breast cancer screening. Women can print out a summary to take to a medical consultation for discussion, and so the doctor can incorporate it into the woman’s medical record.

What is the Evidence Base for iPrevent?

iPrevent uses the well-validated IBIS and BOADICEA algorithms to estimate each woman’s personal risk of breast cancer. An international prospective validation study, conducted using data on over 16,000 women, has confirmed the accuracy of the risk estimates provided. It uses Cancer Australia guidelines to determine which risk management options women are advised about, based on their risk level. An Australian pilot study of women and clinicians has also demonstrated that iPrevent has high usability and acceptability, and suggested that it improves knowledge without increasing anxiety. More detail on iPrevent peer-reviewed publications can be found by clicking the “Information For Clinicians” button on the iPrevent front page.

Young women with premature ovarian insufficiency (POI) may be able to use their own bone marrow stem cells to rejuvenate their ovaries and avoid the effects of premature menopause, new research suggests. The preliminary results from the ongoing ROSE clinical trial were presented at ENDO 2018, the 100th annual meeting of the Endocrine Society, in Chicago, USA.

"In the two participants who have completed the treatment to date, serum estrogen levels have increased as soon as 3 months after the injection of stem cells, and the effect has lasted for at least one year. Their menopausal symptoms have been alleviated, and six months after the injection of the stem cells into the ovaries, they have resumed menses," said senior author Ayman Al-Hendy, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Gynecology and Director of Translational Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The researchers plan to enroll 33 participants in their clinical trial. For the two patients who have undergone the procedure so far, they collected each woman's own mesenchymal stem cells from her posterior iliac crest bone marrow and used minimally invasive laparoscopy to inject the cells into one ovary, keeping the second, untreated, ovary as a control. The authors followed the patients closely with frequent blood work, imaging of the ovaries, menopausal symptom questionnaires, and safety studies.

Now that both women's estrogen levels have increased significantly and they have begun to menstruate, the research team looks forward to the possibility that they may again become fertile.