If your self-image has been hurt by your breast cancer, you need to work at getting back a positive view of yourself. Are you going to great lengths not to look at the scars on your chest? Your reluctance to face the scars is understandable. But experts on healing suggest it's important to get past this attitude.

Athymic nude mice have been used in recent years to study the biology of human tumors and to assess therapeutic responses in vivo rather than just in vitro. Some human tumors metastasize in nude mice, providing model systems for analyzing various aspects of the metastatic phenotype of human neoplasms. For breast carcinomas, however, the tumor-take rate of surgical specimens is low, and only a limited number of cell lines proliferate in nude mice. The site of injection of the breast carcinoma cells is important; tumors grow at a lower inoculum dose and with shorter latent intervals after implantation in the mammary fatpad of nude mice than after injection in the subcutis. One breast carcinoma cell line, MDA-MB, metastasizes from mammary fatpad tumors to lymph nodes, lungs, and other visceral organs.

Although there have been extensive studies of rodent breast tumor models, and of human breast cancer cell lines in culture, there is still need for a human tumor model which can be manipulated experimentally but also provides a valid expression of the tumor cells in a host environment. Athymic nude mice bearing transplanted human breast tumors have been proposed as such a model. This review therefore discusses the use of the athymic nude mouse model of the study of human breast cancer biology, and focuses on four subjects:.