Breast cancer is a prevalent and potentially fatal disease, leading to more than 200000 new cancer cases and almost 40000 deaths in the United States in 2009, according to the National Cancer Society. Although the prospect of developing breast cancer is frightening, new breast cancer patients diagnosed now have a much higher chance of survival than in the past. Through the work of thousands of researchers, doctors can now use breakthrough technologies to effectively treat breast cancer while minimizing side effects to increase the quality of life of the patient.
Advances in Breast Cancer Surgery
In the past, when women were diagnosed with breast cancer, their only option was a radical mastectomy. During this aggressive procedure, a surgeon removes the entire affected breast, breast skin, underling chest muscle and all the lymph nodes surrounding the breast. Due to the invasiveness of the surgery, women who underwent a radical mastectomy faced a significant healing period, with the risk of a number of complications due to the surgery.
Advances in technology have allowed for the development of less invasive surgeries. Women with small or less invasive cancers can undergo a breast-sparing surgery: a lumpectomy. This procedure allows the surgeon to spare the healthy breast tissue and just remove the cancerous tissue from the breast, which is must less invasive than a radical mastectomy. Combined with radiation therapy, a lumpectomy is as effective as a radical mastectomy for smaller tumors, according to BreastCancer.org.
Invention of Intensity-Modulated Radiation
Another breakthrough in breast cancer is the development of more sensitive radiation procedures, such as intensity-modulated radiation therapy, or IMRT. Less developed methods of radiation expose the entire breast to radiation, damaging and eventually killing fast-growing cells in the breast, like cancer cells. Although an effective cancer treatment, radiation treatment can also damage other cells in the breast, and lead to side effects when healthy tissue becomes exposed to radiation.
The development of IMRT allows doctors to more accurately focus radiation into the tumor, using breast imaging technology. During IMRT, doctors use breast imaging to construct a three dimensional view of the breast, and use a computer to pinpoint areas of cancer growth. The computer can then target a dose of radiation into the tumor, avoiding healthy breast tissue on the tumor margins. As a result, doctors can use a higher level of radiation to more effectively damage the tumor. According to the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center, this procedure also reduces the risk of complications in normal tissue from 10 percent to two percent.
Development of Targeted Therapies
The invention of targeted therapies to treat breast cancer has lead to the ability to specifically target drugs to cancer cells, minimizing the side effects that can occur from harming normal tissue. Non-targeted treatments, like chemotherapy, kill rapidly-dividing cells throughout the body, instead of specifically killing cancer cells. As a result, patients receiving chemotherapy often experience a number of side effects, such as harmfully low blood counts due to bone marrow damage, according to CancerHelp UK.
Targeted therapies allow doctors to specifically target cancer cells during treatment. Antibody-based therapies, such as Herceptin, recognize breast cancer cells based on the presence of specific proteins on the surface of the cancer cell. Once the drug recognizes and binds the cancer cell, it targets that cell for degradation by the immune system. Through the development of targeted therapies, patients may develop fewer side effects over the course of cancer treatment.
