A few days ago, hardy souls started doing their bit for cancer research (this is Breast Cancer Awareness Month) by plunging into the Serpentine in Hyde Park.

There was also encouraging news from the recent European Society for Medical Oncology conference in Istanbul about the use of Herceptin to treat HER2-positive breast cancer patients.

Research has indicated that using Herceptin without chemotherapy still doubles survival time before the disease progresses. For patients with advanced breast cancer who are hormone receptor positive as well as HER2 positive, the cancer can be kept under control for longer with Herceptin — and a study suggests that three times more patients respond to a combined treatment of Herceptin and anastrozole (an aromatase inhibitor) than to hormone therapy with anastrozole alone.

Two thirds of breast cancer patients have hormone receptor positive disease. Most of these patients are likely to have a good prognosis provided that the cancer is diagnosed early and they are given appropriate hormonal therapies such as tamoxifen or, increasingly, one of the aromatase inhibitors.

However, a quarter of the patients who are hormone receptor positive are also HER2 positive, and HER2 positive patients tend to have an aggressive form of the disease. The patients who are both hormone receptor and HER2 positive must have treatment with Herceptin — to target the HER2 protein — as well as hormone therapy.

Studies have also emphasised the importance of testing every breast cancer patient for their HER2 status as well as determining whether they are oestrogen and progesterone receptor positive.

Herceptin was first licensed in Europe in 2000, and approved by NICE for use in the UK to treat advanced breast cancer in 2002. In August NICE also approved the use of Herceptin in HER2 positive breast cancer patients, even though their disease was not advanced.

One woman in nine in the UK develops breast cancer at some time in her life. Some 41,000 women a year are found to have breast cancer and 13,000 of them will die, but the incidence continues to rise as standards of living improve and childbearing tends to happen later in a woman’s life.

Recent US research has confirmed the importance of early diagnosis in older women. Only when the UK adopts the same standards of breast screening as the Americans will the death rate here start to fall to the same degree.

If we could screen women over 65 regularly and cut the interval between mammographies from three years to once a year, as in the US, breast cancer would no longer be a killer in 90 per cent of cases.