Breast Cancer: New Hope
More than 210,000 American women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year, but new treatments give those patients a much better chance at survival.
In Part Two of The Early Show series on breast cancer awareness, Dr. Elisa Port, a breast cancer surgeon at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, discussed these treatments with co-anchor Rene Syler, herself a breast cancer survivor.
"Treatment for (breast cancer) still involves three main components: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy for most women," Dr. Port said. "There are improvements being made in each one of these different areas that are pushing things along."
For screening, she continued, "For the general population, mammograms are the best in terms of picking up new cancers and diagnosing cancer early. But for some women, there is a push toward doing more MRIs because they can pick up some cancers that mammograms miss. About 10 percent of all breast cancers are not seen on mammograms. For those women, if we can do a good job of picking out who those women might be, those are patients who may benefit from MRI, for example."
Usually, Dr. Port pointed out, MRIs are used in conjunction with mammograms, not instead of.
High-risk patients are one group for which MRIs might be used with mammograms, Dr. Port observed, adding, "There are women who are young, with very dense breasts, where a mammogram might miss something, who we know are at extremely high risk for breast cancer. … Another group are those who are diagnosed with a breast cancer where they come in, they feel a lump, we've proven it's cancer and yet the mammogram is normal. That's a question, that's a time where we ask ourselves, 'What else is going on that we don't know about?' And we should look further to make sure we're not missing anything in those women."
There are also new ways to administer radiation now.
Said Dr. Port, "There is a lot of experimentation going on with different ways of radiating patients where it is more convenient for them, less toxic, and so forth. One of the ways, for example, that we're experimenting with at Sloan-Kettering involves placing an actual radiation applicator in the breast at the time of the surgery. The radiation is given during the surgery so, when the patient is done with surgery, that day, they go home, having had their surgery, having had their radiation. Not all women are eligible for this type of treatment, but it is one way where we're doing things new and differently and making it more convenient for women."
The radiation technique is still in the experimental phase, Dr. Port concluded.
To watch the interview with Dr. Port,