New tool helps women with breast cancer avoid surgery

New tool helps women with breast cancer avoid surgery

2 Feb 2015

According to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, women with lymph node-positive breast cancer, treated with chemotherapy before surgery, may avoid underarm nodes surgical removal.  A new method comes to help doctors evaluate the patient’s response to chemotherapy and therefore decide whether they should proceed with a surgery or not. Ultrasound proved to be a useful tool for judging, before breast cancer surgery, whether chemotherapy eliminated cancer from the underarm lymph nodes. 

 

Added value with ultrasound

As today many breast cancer patients receive chemotherapy before surgery, more women have their cancer eradicated from the lymph nodes by the time they reach the operating room. The current study comes to add that repeating ultrasound after chemotherapy is a sound way to help determine whether surgeons should remove only a few lymph nodes and test them for cancer.

As a result, this method:

• Helps patients whose sentinel nodes are cancer-free to avoid the removal of all nodes in the armpit, or take out all of the nodes, as argued by the lead author Judy C. Boughey, M.D. a breast surgeon at Mayo Clinic in Rochester. Thus, fewer women will experience the complications that can accompany that surgery, such as an arm swelling condition called lymphedema and limited motion of the arm.
• Leads to personalized surgical treatment based on how the patient responds to chemotherapy; and
• Consequently saves healthcare costs.

What about radiation treatment for cancer lymph nodes?

Another way to treat lymph nodes, positive for cancer after chemotherapy, is radiation treatment after surgery. A new study is underway to evaluate which is more effective: removing all of those nodes, or leaving the nodes and treating them with radiation.

 

Source: eCancer News