Word: breast
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This year, according to the American Cancer Society, some 200,000 women (and 1,500 men) will learn that they have breast cancer--up from a little more than 100,000 two decades ago. While the death rate from the disease has dropped modestly over the past decade, there is a growing sense of frustration among cancer experts. Part of the problem is DCIS. Thirty years ago, these miniature tumors, which usually don't spread into the rest of the body, were diagnosed in some 6% of breast-cancer patients. Today the ratio is closer to 20%, largely because...
...Surgeons are developing several techniques that destroy tumors while sparing more breast tissue--without reducing the chances of survival. (This can be particularly important for small-breasted women who don't necessarily have a lot of tissue to spare in the first place...
Before peering any further into the future, however, it helps to know a little biology. Most breast cancers begin in the milk ducts, narrow passageways that radiate throughout the breast. A few cells, for reasons that are not completely understood, start accumulating genetic mistakes that cause them to grow abnormally. Eventually the cells develop into DCIS. The good thing about dcis cells is that they haven't spread beyond the milk duct. The bad thing is that they are malignant. "Some people call DCIS precancer, but it's not precancer," says Dr. Dennis Slamon, director of breast-cancer research...
...many types of toxins and wastes. Tumors growing in the lymph nodes have a greater chance of breaking off and traveling to the bones, brain, lungs or other parts of the body, where they can seed new growths, called metastases. Here again, doctors used to think that any breast cancer that had spread to the lymph nodes must have been growing a long time. Now they realize that the fact the cancer has shown up in the lymph nodes may have more to do with how aggressive it was from the start than with how long it has been growing...
...accord? It probably doesn't matter too much how quickly you treat these slow-growing tumors; most women would survive. And if that's the case, wouldn't it make sense to leave those tumors alone until you could figure out whether they are going to grow? Some breast-cancer experts even speculate that more women may die with these tumors in their breast than because of them...