Kylie Bombshell

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Cancer diagnosis postpones Kylie's tour

By Julie Robotham and Bernard Zuel
May 18, 2005


World tour postponed after diagnosis … Kylie Minogue in her Showgirl tour attire.


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Of her desire to start a family, Kylie Minogue was already wearing her heart on her diaphanous sleeve. "Obviously a woman of my age can't help but think about those things," she told the talk show host Michael Parkinson two years ago when he asked the baby question.

Now her priority is fighting for her life. Yesterday the 36-year-old singer announced she had been diagnosed with early breast cancer. And as doctors work out her best course of treatment and how to spare her fertility, she, like thousands of other women with cancer, will be coming to terms with this alarming fact: 30 per cent of women diagnosed under the age of 40 die within 10 years - a higher proportion than among older patients.

Minogue, who got the news while at home with her family in Melbourne this week, has postponed her Australian tour, which has sold more than 200,000 tickets and was due to start tomorrow night.

"I was so looking forward to bringing the Showgirl tour to Australian audiences, and am sorry to disappoint my fans. Nevertheless hopefully all will work out fine and I'll be with you all again soon," she said in a statement yesterday.

Her sister, Dannii, said last night the news was "very upsetting, although as the cancer has been diagnosed at such an early stage we are all very optimistic that everything will be OK. We're all very thankful for the endless messages of love and support Kylie has been receiving."

Almost 12,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in Australia each year, 5 per cent of whom are in their 20s and 30s. Punishing chemotherapy regimens can trigger an early menopause in up to half of those women who need to take it. And that is just one of the medical and psychological issues involved in treating breast cancer.

After the first big decision - whether to remove the whole breast or just excise the tumour - and a six- to seven-week course of radiation therapy, the biggest thing women had to deal with was chemotherapy, said John Boyages, executive director of the NSW Breast Cancer Institute.

He said younger women were more likely to require chemo-therapy, with up to 70 per cent receiving a course of powerful anti-cancer drugs, depending on the grade of their tumour - information not yet publicly known about Minogue's disease. "Just giving chemotherapy can send a woman into early menopause," Professor Boyages said. Depending on the drugs used, the likelihood of this happening ranged from 35 per cent to more than half.

For other women, drugs are recommended to suppress the female hormone oestrogen, which some forms of breast cancer need to grow. Blocking the oestrogen can starve the cancer, but it too is likely to induce early menopause.

In some ways the physical treatment may be the easy part. Coping with the diagnosis is a challenge many women find even more forbidding, Professor Boyages said. "There's no doubt life stops [after diagnosis]. It's very hard in the first year." And the second year, after treatment is mostly over, was just as arduous as women had to face their fears for the future.

Minogue is insistent that her tour is only postponed, not cancelled. Her tour's promoter, Michael Gudinski, who has been Minogue's friend for 20 years and one of the first outside her family to learn of her condition, said: "All the equipment will be staying in Australia and hopefully we'll be able to reschedule the dates pretty soon. But there's no pressure. We can't hypothesise but we'll see in a couple of weeks."

Minogue also postponed concerts in South-East Asia and her appearance at Glastonbury, England. Tickets for the Australian tour, which was to have been one of the biggest-grossing tours of the year, earning at least $20 million, will be valid for the new dates when they are announced.

Minogue is not the first Australian female singer to get cancer. Her fellow Neighbours alumnus Delta Goodrem was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease two years ago and Olivia Newton-John had a brush with breast cancer in 1992.

Early breast cancer means the tumour has not spread beyond the breast into the lymphatic system or elsewhere in the body. With Minogue's diagnosis so recent it is likely her medical team will want further tests to confirm that it has indeed remained localised.

Lack of spread is an encouraging sign, but not the only determinant in a breast cancer prognosis. Doctors will also need to discover which of several types of cancer cells are involved, and will grade the tumour according to its aggressiveness. A higher proportion of young women have aggressive breast cancers - one reason for their relatively poor survival rates.

Helen Zorbas, director of the Sydney-based National Breast Cancer Centre, said that while mammography screening was not recommended in women aged 40, Minogue's experience should prompt young women, "to be aware of any changes in their breast and not ignore them. More and more people are surviving the disease. It's not a death sentence."

It was unclear why some young women developed breast cancer, she said, but family history was important. People were at higher risk if their mothers, sisters and aunts had breast cancer. "But a family history on both sides of the family … it's just as important on the father's side," Dr Zorbas said.

A family history of other cancers - particularly ovarian, bowel, kidney, and the prostate cancer for which Minogue's father has been treated - could also increase the risk of breast cancer. Entering puberty early, delaying childbirth, having fewer children and not breastfeeding also increased the risk because each increased the cumulative amount of the hormone oestrogen to which the woman was exposed. Drinking more than two standard alcoholic drinks daily raised the likelihood of developing breast cancer. But smoking made no difference.

One of the biggest issues younger women had to deal with, Dr Zorbas said, was, "sexuality and body image. The breast is inextricably associated with your sexuality, and how you deal with that is very important." Younger women were more likely to become depressed and anxious after their diagnosis, she said, and doctors had a responsibility to ask questions about how they were faring psychologically, rather than wait for patients to raise the issue.

Mr Gudinski could not say how Minogue was handling the news, but he paid tribute to her spirit. "I've never heard of an artist in my life … it's so Kylie, to have put in her own press release that she wrote herself today that she's sorry to have disappointed her fans. Knowing Kylie and what she's written here … I'd say she'd be more concerned about how worried her family and people around her are. But also this shows that no one's above it [breast cancer] and if this can send a message out to all girls to deal with breast cancer I know Kylie would feel good about it."

At least Minogue will be free of one of the dilemmas faced by young breast cancer patients. According to Dr Zorbas, many women agonise about new relationships. "When do you bring up the fact you've had breast cancer? Do you bring it up on the first date?" As news of her diagnosis zips around the planet, there will be barely a person who does not know what she is facing.