A common first-line treatment for breast cancer is surgery, in which a surgeon removes all or part of the affected breast to remove the cancerous cells. In many cases, surgery presents an effective treatment for breast cancer, but may require a lengthy recovery and may have lasting side effects, such as stiffness in the shoulder joint. Women wishing to forego breast cancer surgery may receive a number of other breast cancer treatments to kill cancer cells.
Breast Radiation
Patients seeking an alternative to breast cancer surgery may undergo breast radiation and radiation therapy. During radiation treatment, the patient lies on her back on a table while the doctor aims a beam of radiation into the affected breast. The high dose of radiation harms essential structures within the cancer cells, eventually promoting cancer cell death and tumor shrinkage.
A breast cancer patient may require several doses of radiation therapy to effectively ablate breast tumor growth. The treatment is generally painless, according to BreastCancer.org, but can lead to the development of some side effects, such as radiation burns on the skin over the affected breast. Radiation can effectively kill cancer cells localized within the breast, but does not target any breast cancer cells that have migrated to other parts of the body.
Chemotherapy
Women seeking an alternative to breast cancer surgery may also receive chemotherapy to treat their cancer. Unlike radiation, which targets cancer cells within a specific part of the body, chemotherapy allows doctors to kill cancer cells that have migrated away from the breast, as well as cells within the initial breast tumor.
Chemotherapy drugs range in their mechanism of action, but generally interfere with essential cellular processes or damage fundamental structures within the cancer cells to cause cancer cell death. While effective at killing breast cancer cells, chemotherapy drugs also target other populations of proliferating cells in the body, such as bone marrow cells. As a result, patients undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer may suffer from low blood cell counts, which can lead to complications in treatment, reports Cancer Treatment UK. Patients may receive chemotherapy drugs alone or in combination to effectively fight their cancer.
Hormone Therapy
Some forms of breast cancer respond well to hormone-based therapies, so these treatments may present a viable option to breast cancer surgery. Some breast cancers contain proteins called hormone receptors, that allow the cell to respond to circulating hormones such as estrogen. Upon contact with estrogen in the blood, the breast cancer cells begin to proliferate, so the presence of estrogen helps to drive breast cancer formation and growth.
Hormone-based therapies, such as Tamoxifen, seek to disrupt normal estrogen signalling and prevent the breast cells from proliferating in response to estrogen. These drugs can prevent the cells from sensing estrogen in the bloodstream or can decrease the overall levels of estrogen in the body, removing the proliferative signals driving breast cancer growth. Women seeking hormone-based therapies as an alternative to breast cancer surgery must first undergo medical testing to determine whether their breast cancer will likely respond to hormonal therapies.
