Newly Diagnosed / Treatment Decisions INVASIVE CANCER What is invasive cancer?
If you have invasive ductal cancer, it means that cancer cells have
broken out of the ducts and moved into the surrounding fat tissue in
the breast. This is the most common type of invasive breast cancer.
About 1 in 10 (10 percent) of invasive breast cancers are invasive
lobular cancers. If you have this type of breast cancer, it means that
the cancer cells have broken out of the lobules and moved into the
surrounding fat tissue in the breast.
How is it treated?
Most invasive breast cancers have been present for 8–10 years by the
time they have been detected on a mammogram or physical exam. During
that time there is plenty of opportunity for the cancer cells to get
out of the breast and spread to the rest of the body. Sometimes the
immune system takes care of these cells and sometimes it doesn't.
Because cancer can spread very early, two types of treatments are used
to treat invasive cancer. Local treatments—surgery and radiation—deal
with the disease in the breast and are aimed at preventing your cancer
from coming back in the breast. Systemic treatments—hormones and
chemotherapy—target any cancer cells that may have already spread into
the rest of your body. The usual order of treatment is surgery,
chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and, if the tumor is
hormone-sensitive, hormone therapy. If the tumor is HER2-positive,
Herceptin may be used along with or after chemotherapy (HER2 is also
sometimes referred to as HER-2 or Her-2/neu or erb-b2).
Surgery and Radiation
The main goal of local therapy is to prevent breast cancer from coming
back in the specific area in which the cancer appears. This can be done
by taking out as much of the cancer as possible in a lumpectomy and
letting radiation destroy any remaining cells. A second option is to
have a mastectomy. If the tumor is small, and you choose to have a
mastectomy, you will not need radiation. If it is large, you will need
to have a mastectomy, to remove as much of the tumor as possible, and
radiation therapy, to take care of leftover cells. It is important to
realize that you can have a local recurrence regardless of which
treatment you have. You can learn more about mastectomy and
reconstructive surgery in our feature story, "Breast Reconstruction—What You Need to Know."
Many women continue to believe that they will be more likely to survive
breast cancer if they remove one breast—or even both. For this reason,
more women than necessary continue to have mastectomies. If the idea of
removing the whole breast makes you feel better psychologically, that's
fine. But you should know that large randomized studies with as much as
20 years of follow-up have shown that both approaches—mastectomy and
lumpectomy followed by radiation—result in the same survival rates.
There are some situations where there may be<
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