Breast Cancer Treatment

Also referred to as breast carcinoma, one in every eight women is affected by breast cancer during their lives. After lung cancer, breast cancer is the highest type of cancer that kills women in the U.S. While nobody knows for sure why some women seem to be susceptible to breast cancer, however, there are certain risk factors. Some of the risks that cannot be changed are:

Personal risk factors: the periods beginning before the age of 12 or undergoing menopause after the age of 55.

Genetic factors: The presence of the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 are indicative of greatly increasing the risk of getting breast cancer. It is advisable for women who have breast cancer incidences amongst the members of their family to get themselves tested.

Age factor: With advancing age there are increasing chances of getting breast cancer.

Some of the other risks are: having dense breasts; being childless or having the first child after the age of 35; consumption of alcohol; using birth control pills; being on hormone replacement therapy; and being overweight.

While breast cancer can affect men too, the number of cases is very few.

Some of the symptoms of breast cancer are: fluid being discharged from a nipple; changes in the shape or size of the breast; a lump formation in the breast. Breast cancer treatment can include lumpectomy, mastectomy, radiation therapy, hormone therapy, and chemotherapy.

Various Methods of Breast Cancer Treatment

Surgery – Lumpectomy and Mastectomy: Surgery, even after more than a century, continues to be one of the main treatments for breast cancer. It is usually succeeded by breast cancer radiation treatment. Some patients may also require chemotherapy along with hormone therapy.

Breast conserving surgery, which is also known as lumpectomy, is surgically removing only the tissue that is cancerous. Radiation therapy usually follows. Surgically removing the breast is known as mastectomy. Both the surgeries can be combined with tests checking for cancer in the lymph nodes that are located near the affected breast.

In recent years, as compared to the past, things have changed a fair amount as far as breast surgery like lumpectomy and mastectomy are concerned. These days, the aim is targeted, precise surgery with the objective of preserving as much of the healthy parts of the breast, along with the surrounding tissues, as possible. Even breast removal, or mastectomy, is a far less drastic option and much more refined procedure than it used be a generation back.

Radiation Therapy: Also known as radiotherapy, breast cancer radiation therapy is a highly effective, targeted method of destroying cancer cells that may remain after surgery. The high-energy radiation beams are concentrated on the affected part, such as the breast area and the lymph nodes. With time, this concentrated radiation causes damage to the cells that are in the beam’s path, both cancer cells as well as normal cells. However, cancer cells are affected more by radiation than normal cells. The reason being that cancer cells grow and make new cells at a much faster rate, and these are the two activities that make the cells vulnerable to the damaging effects of radiation. Plus, since cancer cells are less organized compared to healthy cells, it is more difficult for them to recover by repairing themselves. Hence radiation destroys cancer cells far more easily, whereas normal, healthy cells are able to repair themselves better and thus survive.

Radiation therapy reduces the chances of recurrence by up to 50 percent to 66 percent. Although most women fear it, breast cancer radiation therapy is tolerated relatively easily, and the side effects are confined to the treated area. The radiation therapy is supervised by a radiation oncologist, who is a specialist in radiation therapy.

Chemotherapy: This is a systemic treatment, which means the whole body is affected because chemotherapy goes through the bloodstream. Chemotherapy’s purpose is to kill any cancer cells that could have spread to some other part of the body from the original location of the cancer.

The reason chemotherapy is effective against cancerous cells is because of the way the drugs hinder the rapid division of cells. The infamous side effects caused by chemotherapy are because there are other cells in the body that divide rapidly such as the cells in the hair, vagina, nails, nose, intestinal tract, mouth, and blood. This results in chemotherapy affecting them as well.

Nonetheless, these days chemotherapy has also been refined so that it is tolerated much more easily than it used to be even a few years back. And it is an important insurance against cancer recurring for many women. It must also be kept in mind that organs such as the kidneys and liver, wherein there is no rapid cell division, are usually not affected by chemotherapy. Plus, medical professionals keep track of the side effects closely and have the ability to treat them in order to reduce their detrimental effects.

Hormone Therapy: Hormone therapy is a highly effective treatment against hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer. Sometimes referred to as ‘anti-estrogen therapy’, hormone therapy is used to block the hormone estrogen’s ability of turning on and stimulating the growth of breast cancer cells.

Tamoxifen has been used as the first choice of hormonal treatment for all women afflicted with hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer for years. However, according to the results of major clinical trials conducted worldwide, which came out in 2005, it was shown that aromatase inhibitors like Femara (letrozole), Aromasin (exemestane), and Arimidex (anastrozole) were more effective than Tamoxifen for treating post-menopausal women who had hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer.

Hence, today the standard choice of treatment for post-menopausal women who have hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer is aromatase inhibitors, while pre-menopausal women continue to be treated with Tamoxifen.