Fifty percent of women may not need chemotherapy to treat breast cancer, thanks to specially selected treatments, cancer experts say.
Dr. Julie Gralow, a breast cancer specialist at the Seattle Cancer Research Center, recalled that 10 years ago, oncologists recommended chemotherapy to all women with early cancer.
However, these days, genomic testing allows doctors to determine drug susceptibility, or resistance to treatment, so today half of women refuse traditional chemotherapy in favor of less toxic targeted drug therapy.
“Compared to chemotherapy, which is the most toxic treatment, the effective alternative we have offered in the form of hormone therapy is, of course, a very good replacement for patients,” says Gralow.
Radiation oncologists from the Center for Research on Cancer Research are simultaneously working on new methods that would significantly reduce the level of radiation received for some patients with breast cancer.
Dr. Janice Kim, a specialist in radiation therapy for breast cancer, plans to lead a new treatment protocol for the early stages of breast cancer. The standard treatment for relapse is mastectomy (removal of the mammary gland) without the use of radiation therapy, since too much radiation often leads to irreversible damage to normal breast tissue.
Instead, in accordance with the new approach, women will be offered a lumpectomy (repeated removal of the breast tumor) followed by "accelerated partial irradiation of the breast", that is, exposure to the tumor bed with high doses of radiation twice a day for only five days.
If this technique is effective, then women will be less likely to undergo surgical interventions and radiotherapy.
