Breast cancer cure & treatment choice
The risk of breast cancer rises as women get older. Even now, a lot of women who grow the disease have no known threat factors other than growing older, and a lot of women with known risk factors do not grow breast cancer.
There are various types of risk factors. A number of factors affect danger more than others, and your risk for breast cancer could alter over time, because of factors like aging or lifestyle.
When faced with a diagnosis of breast cancer, treatment options are a lifeline and offer hope for a future. Ongoing research has expanded breast cancer treatment options to include a variety of effective, life-saving therapies. The most effective treatment(s) for you depends on a number of factors. While there are a variety of treatments available, each falls into one of two categories - local and systemic. Local treatments are those which destroy or remove cancer cells from a specific area of the body. Systemic treatments go beyond a localized area and fight cancer cells throughout the entire body. Local Treatments
Surgery:
Surgery is typically the first local breast cancer treatment used.
Surgical procedures are Lumpectomy - the removal of the lump or tumor
only. Generally, a lumpectomy is performed when the cancer is found
early, the lump is small and in only one part of the breast. Mastectomy
- removal of the entire breast. This procedure is usually performed when
cancer cells have spread throughout the breast or into other areas of
the body.
Radiation:
Another local breast cancer treatment, radiation often follows a
lumpectomy or mastectomy. It's used to target a specific area and
designed to destroy any remaining cancer cells left after surgery.
Systemic Treatments:
Systemic treatments destroy cancer cells throughout the body by traveling through the bloodstream. These treatments are used to get rid of cancer cells that may have spread from the original tumor location to another part of the body.
Chemotherapy:
Chemotherapy is simply the use of drugs to fight cancer cells. There
are many different chemotherapy drugs available that may be used alone
or in combination depending on the type of cancer. Treatment time frames
vary from drug to drug.
Hormone Therapy:
In some types of cancers, hormones actually help the cancer cells grow. These are known as hormone-receptor-positive breast cancers. The goal of hormone therapy is to keep these hormones from getting to cancer cells. stopping the estrogen from working.
This therapy doesn't work with cancers that are not affected by hormones.
Targeted Therapies:
Targeted therapies are newer breast cancer treatment options. They are drugs that can be combined with chemotherapy to fight a specific characteristic of a cancer cell. For example, a drug that targets a specific protein in a cancer cell may be used to stop the cell from growing. New and promising targeted therapies continue to evolve.
While this is not an all-inclusive list of breast cancer treatment options, it does include the most widely-used treatments available today. If you have been diagnosed with breast cancer, learn as much as you can about available treatment options including clinical trials.
