Spirit Fall 2020 Edition 17
blood and may cause a problem down the line. Radiation just targets whatever cancer could be left in the breast after the surgery, so it’s just focused there. Most of the breast cancers are hormone-sensitive, meaning they feed on female hormones estrogen and progesterone. Premenopausal ovaries are the main glands producing the hormones, but once someone goes through menopause, there are adrenal glands that sit on top of the kidneys that produce estrogen and progesterone, and there is conversion of other hormones in the fat tissue. Even when someone goes through menopause, they still have estrogen and progesterone in their system. So to target all that, we use hormone blocking pills. On how treatments are changing Previously we were doing mastectomies, removing the entire breast, but we’ve gotten to know more about that. There’s more scarring, more limitations as to how much someone can do after the surgery. So what we’ve been doing now is a lumpectomy, which is removal of the cancer itself and some surrounding tissue. Lumpectomy always has to be followed by radiation therapy. If we do mastectomy — some patients still elect to do that because they don’t want to worry about it coming back — then they can skip radiation, provided there’s no cancer in the lymph nodes. On clinical trials at GPH We do clinical trials mostly in
collaboration with the University of Nebraska Medical Center or Creighton University, like the Nebraska Cancer Consortium. There are some other trials we’re doing with the pharmaceutical companies, too. So we do have some clinical trial options. It’s mainly to take a tested and proven approach and add something on top of it to see if someone has a better outcome or not. There are certain criteria test participants have to meet, so whenever we see a new patient or have to change treatment, we’ll see if someone will qualify for a clinical trial. Clinical trials are the reason we know what we know now, so we encourage everyone to participate. Using all these treatment approaches is one thing, but there are things the patient can do to minimize the risk of the cancer coming back in the future. One of these is alcohol moderation; studies have shown that someone who is consuming more alcohol has a higher risk of breast cancer. Regular exercise has also been shown to decrease the risk of breast cancer coming back. Weight reduction, especially if On how patients can reduce their risk of cancer returning someone is obese or overweight, if they can get into a healthy weight range, that has been shown to decrease the risk of breast cancer. For much younger age groups, breastfeeding has been shown to help reduce breast cancer risk.
The idea is to attack the cancer with all the modalities that are available. With surgery, the surgeon can take out whatever cancer they can see with their eye, but there might be some cancer left behind, which may or may not be visible in mammograms or scan. Chemotherapy’s purpose is to attack those cancer cells that might be floating around in the Telegraph file photo Mammogram machines such as this one are used to help screen women for breast cancer.
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