Tuesday 13 May 2008

Chemotherapy Before Breast Surgery is Valuable-Many Eligible Patients Are Unaware of Therapy Option

I have, on numerous occasions, blogged about Breast Cancer. Being in the category of "high risk" group myself, coupled with the knowledge that some of our friends have unfortunately joined in this bitter battlefield in recent years, I will never hesitate in creating awareness in fighting breast cancer and I will share with you all of any news and knowledge that I have heard or read for the benefit of the entire female population.

Probably some of you might have heard of this so called "latest news", chemotherapy before breast surgery (it is called 'neoadjuvant chemotherapy') is valuable, but I bet many haven't. A friend of us who went thru mastectomy (removal of the entire breast) recently and found out later thru medical doctors in Singapore during one of her trips there for Chemotherapy.

She may have regretted having performed the surgery a little too rush, as most patient would have the thought of cancer cells will spread very quickly if the tumor is not remove soonest. Taking into consideration the agony and pain avalanched upon you hearing the bad news from the doctor, no one can blame you for losing that sturdiness.

Come back to the above subject, I will leave it to you bright readers to judge for yourself. As the article said,
"We can't say that neoadjuvant therapy is better for survival, but we can say neoadjuvant therapy is not worse, and it has its advantages".

Isn't it obvious that going thru the Chemotherapy in a stronger body before surgery is a wider choice?






2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Usually the principle of treatment of cancer is 1stly to remove the mass of cancer cells that is by surgery. And then 2ndly, eradicate all the possible remaining cells by chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

But maybe it's possible to use chemotherapy to reduce it's size and then probably removal of whole breast tissue is not needed, only the lump is required.

Swiss Palma said...

Agree with you the "usual" way of treating breast cancer. But most of the time the surgery made the patient tend to be very weak and the recovery normally takes 3 to 6 weeks, losing appetite after surgery will further weaken the physical aspect for the preparation of chemotherapy. These are my personal points of view. Thanks for sharing yours too.