More Women Having Second Breast Removed After Cancer To Prevent Recurrence, Study Finds
September 21, 2011
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The number of women with cancer in 1 breast who opt to have the other breast preventively removed — identified as a contralateral prophylactic mastectomy — far more than doubled from 1995 by means of 2005 in New York state, based on a study published Monday in the journal Cancer, the Los Angeles Times reports. There is no evidence that having a preventive mastectomy improves survival, based on lead author Stephen Edge, a professor of surgery and oncology at Roswell Park Cancer Institute. Edge stated, “We aren’t making a value judgment that this is good or bad.” He added, “But it’s an essential trend. The concern is the fact that we have women performing this out of a gut reaction” without having sufficient counseling about threat.
According towards the study, nearly five,000 New York females opted for the contralateral procedure throughout the evaluation period. The study showed that rates of the procedure were steady among women who had never ever had cancer but had a higher risk of developing the illness. According to the Times, healthy ladies may well choose to have each breasts removed if they have a strong family members history of breast cancer or if they test positive for the BRCA-1 or BRCA-2 gene mutations, which boost the threat for the disease.
Todd Tuttle, chief of the Surgical Oncology Division at the University of Minnesota and author of a comparable 2007 study, said it really is unclear why contralateral prophylactic mastectomies have increased. He noted that there now is really a much better understanding about genetic risks and an increased availability of gene testing, as well as substantial improvements in mastectomy and breast reconstruction methods.
Tuttle stated there’s a concurrent trend of females picking mastectomy more than the less-invasive choice of a lumpectomy, in which only the tumor is removed. He said, “Throughout surgery, there’s such an enormous push to do procedures which have much less scarring, the shortest surgery, the shortest recovery,” adding, “That is accurate for every thing except breast cancer” (Roan, Los Angeles Times, 9/29).
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