What Should You Know About the Role of Surgery in Breast Cancer Treatment?

What Should You Know About the Role of Surgery in Breast Cancer Treatment?

What Should You Know About the Role of Surgery in Breast Cancer Treatment? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

Dr. Stephanie Valente explains how surgery approaches, including mastectomy and lumpectomy, are used in treating breast cancer, and addresses common misconceptions about mastectomy.

Dr. Stephanie Valente is the Director of the Breast Surgery Fellowship Program at Cleveland Clinic. More about this expert here.

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Transcript:

Dr. Valente:            

So, breast cancer patients have the option to remove their whole breast, which is called a mastectomy. And if they pick that option, they could choose to have reconstruction or to essentially go flat. Yes, we have even done reconstruction in metastatic breast cancer patients. Metastatic breast cancer patients live for a really long time, so giving them reconstruction to make them feel whole and kind of put them back together after a mastectomy is definitely a good option.        

The other option is to just remove the cancer. So, if the patient has a small breast cancer, and it’s metastatic, we can just say – Hey, you don’t have to have the whole breast removed. So, we can do a lumpectomy, as well.

So, a lumpectomy is essentially a surgery that removes the cancer with a normal rim of tissue around it. We also call it a partial mastectomy, meaning you’re removing just part of the breast. Or it’s also called breast-conserving surgery. So, it’s any method that removes that cancer with a normal rim of healthy tissue around it but allows the woman to keep her breasts.

So, when it comes to surgical choices and a cancer coming back, some women think that if they pick the most advanced surgery, such as a mastectomy, it helps prevent cancer from going somewhere else in the body. And that’s actually not true. Removing both breasts, doesn’t make you live one day longer. At that point, a mastectomy or a lumpectomy is a choice.

And prognosis – meaning whether or not the cancer’s gonna show up somewhere in the body – is based really on two things – the stage at which the breast cancer presents itself and what type of breast cancer it is – meaning is the cancer outside of the lymph nodes? How large is it? And if it’s a triple negative or some other type of breast cancer? Those determine the higher likelihood that somebody could develop metastatic breast cancer later in their life, even though small, early-stage breast cancers, unfortunately, can also develop metastasis later on in life.

But women sometimes think that if they pick the most aggressive surgery, it’s helping prevent metastatic spread later on in life. And that’s actually not the choice.  Breast cancer surgery is the option that women choose to surgically remove their breast cancer. But again, choosing a mastectomy or a lumpectomy for an early-stage breast cancer is a choice of how they wanna remove the breast cancer. But it doesn’t improve the chances that they won’t have metastatic spread later on.

So, the role of surgery for metastatic breast cancer is mainly for what we call to remove the cancer or sometimes for local control. So, the number one treatment if somebody is diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer is systemic therapy. That might be chemotherapy or endocrine therapy. But it’s really to get the metastatic disease under control.

So, where does breast cancer usually go? Bones, liver, lungs, brain. So, surgery to remove the breast or the breast cancer in the breast doesn’t really take care of those problems. But a lot of times for metastatic cancer, the one reason would be for local control. So, if the cancer is causing issues in the breast – swelling, coming out of the skin – where it’s a wound issue, then we’ll remove that to get better control of the area in the breast.

The other reason is if somebody has metastatic cancer, and their cancer in the other area of their body is controlled with the therapy, then we say – Hey, chemo’s working, or the systemic therapy’s working. The only thing that seems to be left is the area in your breast. Then for a conversation with medical oncology, we say you don’t have to come off your medications. This is a good time to remove the breast cancer to control that problem.