Stop Changing Your Mind Please

[A breast cancer tumor imaged with a technique that highlights aspects of its microenvironment.NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE/UNIV. OF CHICAGO COMPREHENSIVE CANCER CENTER]I really wish they would stop changing their mind. I know several women who have had chemo before surgery to reduce the size of their tumor. If you have a woman who has a fairly large tumor and chemo before surgery has the benefit of reducing their surgery - maybe from a mastectomy to a lumpectomy. This is actually a huge benefit. The surgery is so much less drastic. " The main goal of pre-operative (neoadjuvant) chemotherapy for breast cancer is to shrink tumors so women can have a lumpectomy rather than a more invasive mastectomy. It was therefore initially used only on large tumors after being introduced about 25 years ago. But as fewer and fewer women were diagnosed with large breast tumors, pre-op chemo began to be used in patients with smaller cancers, too, in the hope that it would extend survival. "However new research says it isn ' t a good idea. Nice. How helpful. " But pre-op chemo can, instead, promote metastasis, scientists concluded from experiments in lab mice and human tissue, published in Science Translational Medicine.The reason is that standard pre-op chemotherapies for breast cancer — paclitaxel, doxorubicin, and cyclophosphamide — affect the body’s on-ramps to the highways of metastasis, said biologist John Condeelis of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, senior author of the...
Source: Caroline's Breast Cancer Blog - Category: Cancer & Oncology Tags: breast cancer treatment cancer research disappointment Source Type: blogs