Word: breasting
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Taking a page from treatment manuals for prostate cancer, a few doctors have implanted tiny radioactive "seeds" in the breast to ensure that the maximum amount of radiation is delivered near the tumor site. They leave a small, balloon-tipped catheter in the breast after a lumpectomy. The balloon is filled from the outside with the radioactive material for five to 10 minutes twice a day. After five days, both catheter and contents are removed...
...woman is still on the operating table. In an experiment conducted on 15 women in England, physicians inserted a tiny coil into the cavity created by the removal of a tumor. The bottom of the coil was shielded in lead to protect the heart and lungs, while the breast tissue was stretched around the coil. As the surgical team left the room to avoid exposure, the device delivered a full course of radiation treatment at once. After 25 minutes, the coil was removed. In 18 months of follow-up, none of the breast cancers have recurred...
That's why it helps, when trying to sort through the current unsettled state of affairs in breast cancer, to take the long view. "There's always a trend or an issue that everyone's chasing after," says Fran Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition. "I do think we're at a place where we can begin asking some of those questions regarding targeted therapy. But I don't think we're going to get the answers next month or next year...
...paper in the research journal Nature describing a molecular test they have developed that may predict, at the time of surgery, which cancers will be likely to metastasize--and therefore might benefit from chemotherapy. Using so-called DNA microarrays, the researchers analyzed some 25,000 genes from the breast cancers of 100 women. By winnowing the number of relevant markers to about 70 genes, they produced a DNA profile that correlated closely with the women's actual outcomes. "There's not much that stands in the way of this test being used clinically," says Stephen Friend, one of the paper...
...cancer in a lymph node would be a clear signal that chemotherapy was required. But at the upcoming meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in May, a group of cancer experts will recommend that these minute malignancies be left alone, as long as the original breast tumor is small. "We used to seek out and destroy every cell," says Dr. Eva Singletary, a breast surgeon at the M.D. Anderson Center in Houston, who chairs the expert panel. "Now we try to target and control our treatment...