The emerging breast-cancer treatment: No surgery required
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. When a woman learns she has breast cancer , her reaction is often: take it out. Now doctors say that might not always be necessary.
Some women with the earliest stages of breast cancer could be carefully monitored, undergoing surgery and radiation only if the disease advances, new data suggests. The strategy is akin to one already used in early prostate cancer , as doctors are increasingly looking at whether they can pull back on some cancer therapies , to spare patients side effects and costs. “This is really the first study to confirm our suspicions that there’s a subset of low-risk patients that could do just as well without surgery," said Dr.
Nancy Chan , a breast-cancer specialist at NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center, who wasn’t involved in the study . “It’s really encouraging." Some doctors said there wasn’t enough long-term data to prove that the practice is safe. How aggressively to treat this form of early-stage cancer—and whether to call it cancer at all—is controversial.
Some 300,000 women in the U.S. are diagnosed with invasive breast cancer each year. But an additional 50,000 are diagnosed with “stage zero" breast cancer, also called ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS, which occurs when there are cancer cells in a woman’s milk duct but not in her breast tissue.
The disease itself poses little risk but can turn into the more dangerous, invasive cancer. Caught almost exclusively on routine mammograms , cases of DCIS became more common with the advent and expansion of breast-cancer screening. Because they don’t know who will go on to develop invasive breast cancer, oncologists in the U.S.
Read more on livemint.com
