BREAST CANCER
How treatment breast cancer?
Safer, Faster, Better
While doing a breast self-examination recently, 31 year old Diane Washburn felt a lump. She immediately went to her gynecologist, who said that it “didn’t feel quite right.”
In the past Washburn would have undergone a surgical biopsy that required anesthesia and might have caused a scar. Instead, a doctor inserted a thin needle into the lump, withdrew some cells and put them on ka glass slide. “It sounded like it would be painful, but there wasn’t even any anesthesia,” Washburn says. She learned the result ten minutes later: a benign mass. “It was a big relief getting the good news so quickly.
FINE NEEDLE aspiration biopsy is just one of the newer techniques that are making it easier for doctors and patients to deal with breast irregularities. “There has been more progress in detecting and diagnosing breast cancer in the previous 25,” says Dr. Lawrence W.Bassett, director of the iris Cantor Center for Breast Imaging at the University of California at Los Ageles’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Better quality mammography. ”No one with breast cancer dies from cancer in the breast. It just doesn’t hap one tenth of what it was it was 20years ago.” Nevertheless, Dershaw explains, routine mammograms are not recommended for women like Diane Washburn who are younger than age 40. Breast cancer incidence is lower in younger women, and their breast tissue tends to be censer, which can limit the effectiveness of the mammograms.
Concerns have been raised that mammograms are not effective in detecting suspicious breast lumps in Asian woman because of the density of their breast tissue. However, a 1997 Singapore Ministry of Health study found that mammograms can detect early stage breast cancer equally well for Asian and Caucasian woman.
Digital diagnosis. The next step in mammography promises improvement. Instead of the image appearing on film, a digital mammogram is stored on a computer disk or tape. “Then you can do something not possible with ordinary mammograms manipulate the image to increase the contrast,” says Dr. Carolyn Kimme Smith, a medical physicist and associate professor of radiology at University of California at Los Angeles (U.C.L.A) school of Medicine. “This should help us see better what’s hidden in dense tissue.”
Ultrasound. A suspicious lump is seen in about 11 of every 100 mammograms. A woman’s next step may be an examination using ultrasound, or sound waves that produce a picture of the inside of the breast. This technique helps determine whether a lump is something to worry about or, as is usually the case, simply a cyst or other benign mass.
“Ultrasound eliminates the fear of cancer for a large percentage of women with a breast mass, and often there’s no need for a biopsy or any other follow up,” says Dershaw. And thanks to recent technical improvements that reveal more detail,
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