The most common systemic treatment is chemotherapy. The purpose of chemotherapy is to get rid of any cancer cells that may have spread from the breast to other areas of the body. The reason chemotherapy works and also the reason it is so hard on your body is because it attacks the rapidly dividing cancer cells in your body.
Unfortunately cancer cells are not the only cells in your body that divide, thus the reason that chemotherapy can have such a sickening effect on a person. Still, chemotherapy is not as hard to go through today as it was years ago and is an important insurance policy against the spread of the disease, especially to the lymph nodes, which in many cases is fatal.
Breast surgery can be either a lumpectomy, where the tumor is removed, or a partial or modified radical mastectomy. With a lumpectomy, it is typically followed by radiation. This way, you get to keep your breast and studies have shown no difference in survival rates between lumpectomy/radiation and mastectomy.
Most surgeons will get as much of the breast tissue out as they can to help alleviate the chance of a recurrence of your breast cancer. You will typically wind up with a horizontal scar about four inches long. The scar may be red for quite a while but, ultimately, should fade to where you can hardly see it anymore.
Radiation therapy is often used in conjunction with surgery. After a lumpectomy the whole breast is radiated with high energy x-rays, used to kill cancer cells, and after a mastectomy the lymph nodes and chest wall may also be treated. Although radiation does produce side-effects and symptoms, these are usually localized, and this form of treatment is usually well tolerated.
Today most surgery done for breast cancer is considered breast-conserving therapy or what is commonly called a lumpectomy. A lumpectomy is where only the tumor is removed and then once this has been done the patient will undergo a series of weeks of Radiation treatments to cleanse the surrounding tissue and prevent recurrance.
Tamoxifen is a drug that is used as a systemic treatment. Unfortunately it often results in serious and uncomfortable side effects, so it’s not often used. However it certainly has been shown to reduce the risk of breast cancer returning, and in some cases can reduce the risk of developing breast cancer in the first place. Side effects can include uterine cancer, blood clots, early menopause, nausea, vomiting, depression and loss of energy, amongst others.
Early detection of it by regular beast self-examination and regular mammography (Radiography) screening is important. A low – fat diet and moderate alcohol intake may be important. Some researchers theorize that exercise for preadolescent girls may be helpful as it delays the age of onset of menstruation.
Patients may not get the specific chemotherapy dose and also the patient may require two treatments of radiation therapy a day rather than only one treatment, as inflammatory breast cancer is a rapid growing cancer. This is where the importance of an experienced radiologist in inflammatory breast cancer is necessary.