Experts Question Immediate Surgery for Stage 0 Breast Cancer!

Experts Question Immediate Surgery for Stage 0 Breast Cancer!
Experts Question Immediate Surgery for Stage 0 Breast Cancer!

United States: Experts are urging women who are diagnosed with a very early stage of breast cancer to wait for an alternative to surgery.

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The experts also looked at whether it was safe for the entire trial to do active monitoring of a low-risk type of ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS — a cancer that hasn’t spread beyond the milk ducts and is sometimes called Stage 0 breast cancer – rather than operate.

In a study, the researchers followed the participating women and found that the death rate of invasive breast cancer is the same in women assigned to get active monitoring compared with surgery two years after treatment, JAMA reports December 12.

Conversely, in the surgery group, the cumulative invasive cancer rate was found to be 8.7 percent, while that of the monitoring group was 3.1 percent.

According to Shelley Hwang, a breast cancer surgeon at Duke University School of Medicine, out of the cancers present in the monitoring group, at the time of surgery, “those cancers weren’t any bigger, they weren’t any more likely to have spread,” sciencenews.org reported.

How was the monitoring done?

Awareness was maintained through bi-semester screening by mammograms and hormone replacement for most of the women.

Hwang and colleagues say that the findings indicate that expectant management is safe in the short term and likely provides better outcomes for low-risk DCIS because many women will not die from a precancerous condition.

However, as Monica Morrow, a surgical oncologist and chief of breast cancer surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, added, “Two years of follow-up is way, way, way too short to draw that conclusion, sciencenews.org reported.

Visual Representation. Credit | Getty images

She notes that even though the woman in the monitoring group who received delayed surgery were not significantly different in the magnitude of their tumors from the surgery group, the monitoring group had more cancers that were above one centimeter than the surgery group.

“As cancers get bigger, the risk of spread to the women’s [lymph] nodes goes up. The amount of drug therapy we give to treat them increases,” Morrow added.

“So, if by delaying surgery, you end up getting more aggressive treatment than you would have gotten if you had had the surgery in the beginning, is that really a good trade-off?”