New data suggests that some women diagnosed with the earliest stages of breast cancer might not need immediate surgery or radiation therapy. Instead, careful monitoring could be sufficient, with treatment reserved only if the disease progresses.
This approach is similar to strategies already employed in early prostate cancer, where doctors aim to reduce unnecessary interventions to spare patients from side effects and financial costs. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, medical professionals are increasingly considering less aggressive treatments for certain cancers.
“This is really the first study to confirm our suspicions that there’s a subset of low-risk patients that could do just as well without surgery,” said Nancy Chan, a breast cancer specialist at NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study. “It’s really encouraging.”
However, some doctors caution that there isn’t enough long-term data to prove this practice is safe. The debate continues over how aggressively to treat this form of early-stage cancer, known as ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), and whether it should even be labeled as cancer.
Approximately 300,000 women in the United States are diagnosed with invasive breast cancer annually. An additional 50,000 are diagnosed with “stage zero” breast cancer or DCIS, where cancer cells are found in the milk ducts but have not spread to breast tissue. While DCIS poses minimal immediate risk, it can develop into more dangerous, invasive cancer over time.
Reference(s):
cgtn.com
