Breast Cancer And Possible Treatments

According to the latest studies made by American Cancer Society (ACS) more than 190,000 women were affected with breast cancer just in the year 1996 (ACS Breast). In terms of severity, breast cancer comes just after the lung cancer, being the cause of death for hundreds of women every year. But the good side is that several options are available to treat the patients of breast cancer.(ACS Breast). There are two main types if treatments for breast cancer, which are local and systemic. Local treatments are performed by surgical process and radiation therapy to control or kill the cancerous cells in the affected region. The systemic treatments are performed with the help of hormonal therapy and chemotherapy to kill or control the growth of the cancerous cells at any places of the body.Being the common method to treat the breast cancer, the surgery or mastectomy basically deals with removing whole or part of the breast. There are different types of surgery methods for breast cancer. The breast-sparing surgery is another variation of the surgical treatment, which consists of lumpectomies and segmental mastectomies. This surgery is performed by removing the cancerous lump without hampering the surrounding breast tissue. The patient should undergo radiation therapy as a post operative procedure for destroying the remaining cancerous cells in that region. If the radiation is performed as a post-operative treatment of breast sparing surgery, then the patients have to take the radiation for a period of 5-6 weeks considering 5 days of radiation session per week. Implant radiation requires the patient to get admitted into the hospital. The radiation therapy can generate side-effects like breast swelling and dehydrated skin at the radiated area of the body.Chemotherapy is often used as a common procedure to treat breast cancer. The traditional method of chemotherapy is performed following a cycle of treatment period and recovery period and vice versa (NIH 23). Among the other treatments of breast cancer, hormone therapy has come up to be a great success. In this method, medications are used to stop the hormone supply to the tumors, to impede the growth. The bone marrow transplantation might provide positive breakthrough in treating breast cancer. Mostly the doctors and the patient jointly decide to go for a preferred type of treatment. However there are certain deciding factors on the patient's side, which include health condition, age, menopausal condition, tumor location and breast size (ACS Breast). The primary stages of breast cancer are stage I and stage II. In case of stage I, cancer cells remain inside the breast area and the tumor has the diameter of 1 inch or less. The cancer spreads to affect the lymph nodes under the arm and/or the breast tumor has 1-2 inches of diameter, in case of stage II patients.The breast-sparing surgery combined with radiation therapy as the primary local treatment can be effective for the women having primary stage of breast cancer. Whether the patient would go for a mastectomy or breast-sparing surgery depends on certain facts like tumor size and location, the breast size, reports of mammogram and patient's ideas on breast preservation. The patients is this stage, have to go through local and systemic both type of treatments to kill the tumor and to control the cancer growth, respectively. The systemic treatment might include chemotherapy, hormonal therapy, or both together.The metastatic cancer or stage IV is implied by the situation, when the other organs of the body also got affected with cancer (ACS Breast). The stage IV patients go through the chemotherapy and hormonal therapy to reduce the size of the tumor. Researchers are trying to prove the effectiveness of the bone marrow transplant method for the patients in their stage IV.Considering the negative factors of the breast cancer, there are effective ways to treat this deadly disease.

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