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More than a hundred thousand women diagnosed with breast cancer in Europe and the US each year could avoid chemotherapy by taking a gene test made by Agendia, a Dutch biotech group, which can attempt to predict whether the disease is likely to return.
通过接受一家荷兰生物科技集团Agendia开发的一项基因测试，每年确诊患有乳腺癌的逾10万名欧美女性可能不必接受化疗。Agendia可以尝试预测癌症有无复发可能。
Women with early-stage breast cancer are often given chemotherapy after surgery if their tumours are over a certain size or have started to spread to the lymph nodes, factors which suggest they have a high clinical risk of suffering a recurrence.
被确诊患有早期乳腺癌的女性，如果肿瘤尺寸超过一定范围或者开始扩散到淋巴结（这些因素暗示，癌症复发的临床风险非常高），那么通常会在手术之后接受化疗。
But many of them are believed to gain little benefit from undergoing the punishing therapy.
但据信她们中许多人接受这种折磨人的治疗之后，几乎没有收到任何疗效。
According to the results of a large clinical study, to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on Thursday,
根据周四发表于《新英格兰医学杂志》(NEJM)上的一项大型临床研究的结果，
patients who were deemed by the test to have a low genomic risk of recurrent cancer — and who subsequently did not receive chemotherapy — had a similar chance of surviving compared with those who were given the toxic treatment.
测试后被认为从基因组角度衡量癌症复发风险很低——并且随后没有接受化疗——的患者，其生存概率跟那些接受了这种有毒性的疗法的患者差不多。
Agendia said that of the roughly 445,000 women diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer each year in Europe and the US, around 102,000 of them could be able to forego chemotherapy after taking the so-called MammaPrint test.
Agendia表示，在大约44.5万名每年被确认患有早期乳腺癌的欧美女性中，10.2万人在经过所谓MammaPrint测试之后，可能有能力放弃化疗。
The MammaPrint test costs roughly $3,000, but could result in a net reduction in healthcare costs given that a round of chemotherapy costs about $26,000 per patient.
MammaPrint测试的费用约为3000美元，但鉴于每名患者的一轮化疗费用约为2.6万美元，该测试可能实现医疗费用的净减少。
The five-year clinical study of more than 5,000 women found that 94.7 per cent of patients who were categorised as lower-risk by the test survived without their cancer returning and spreading to other parts of the body, about 1.5 per cent lower than those who did receive chemotherapy.
针对逾5000名女性、为期5年的临床研究发现，在被MammaPrint测试认为复发风险更低的患者中，94.7%的人活了下来，癌症并未复发或者扩散到身体其他部位，相比确实接受过化疗的患者低了1.5%。
The MammaPrint test scans biopsies of tumours for 70 genes that govern whether cancerous cells are likely to multiply or invade healthy tissues to determine if there is a high chance of the disease returning even after patients have undergone surgery.
MammaPrint测试对肿瘤的活体组织切片进行扫描，查找掌管癌细胞是否可能会繁殖或入侵健康组织的70种基因，从而判定在患者即便经历手术之后，癌症复发的可能性是否很高。
The findings come as oncologists try to find treatment plans that are less burdensome, especially for women suffering from breast cancer, who sometimes undergo major surgery such as a double mastectomy even when there is a low risk of their disease recurring.
这一研究结果公布之时，肿瘤学家们正尝试寻找负担更小（尤其是对乳腺癌女患者而言）的治疗方案。即使癌症复发的风险很低，这些女患者有时也会进行双侧乳腺切除等大手术。
