New breast cancer options under review
At this purportedly joyous time of the year — although for many people it is not — there is reluctance to focus on topics perceived to be troubling, especially health topics that have a potentially negative implication.
However, the Wall Street Journal, on Dec. 13, reported on a health issue whose details will be welcomed by many women and couples but rejected without hesitation by others, and each group’s reasons for embracing its respective position are worth reflecting upon.
Neither side is wrong, at least not at this time, although some individuals — women as well as men — might envision a bigger chance for a negative outcome from one of the options available than the other.
Therefore, it is important for interested people, as well as the couples dealing with the problem in question, to give each of the options that have evolved careful, cautious reflection before settling on one of them as their option of choice.
The topic at issue: a new initial treatment option for early breast cancer cases.
The Journal’s Dec. 13 article began as follows:
“When a woman learns she has breast cancer, her reaction is often: Take it out. Now doctors say that might not always be necessary.”
According to the article, some women with the earliest stages of breast cancer “could be carefully monitored, undergoing surgery and radiation only if the disease advances.”
The article goes on to say that the new treatment strategy can be likened to one already used for early prostate cancer, and doctors are looking increasingly at whether they can pull back on some cancer therapies, to spare patients side effects and costs.
Dr. Nancy Chan, a breast-cancer specialist at NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center, called the development “really encouraging” and “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.”
But some doctors don’t agree, claiming that not enough data have been compiled to offer enough proof that the practice is safe.
Then there are the viewpoints of the cancer patients themselves.
While some might be content with a wait-and-see approach before considering surgery and/or radiation, others would have difficulty sleeping at night, knowing that cancer had been identified in her body, causing her to worry whether it is growing and, thus, spreading.
The Journal’s report noted that some 300,000 women in the United States are diagnosed with invasive breast cancer each year while an additional 50,000 receive bad news about having what is labeled as “stage zero” breast cancer, also called ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS.
DCIS, caught almost exclusively on routine mammograms, is believed to pose little risk, but evidence shows that it can turn into the more dangerous, invasive cancer.
Thus, whenever it is found, the patient must engage in serious decision-making, in consultation with her doctor, in a timely way.
Oncologists in the United States generally advise women with DCIS to get a combination of surgery, radiation and hormone therapy, but it is the woman, knowing her own body, who must make the ultimate decision regarding her course of care.
No study alone should improperly or hastily influence what that decision will be, and no matter the time of the year.