This blog is our last in the treatment section of Breast Cancer Explained, and discusses targeted therapies, the associated risks and other treatments.
Some breast cancers are stimulated to grow by the hormones oestrogen or progesterone, which are found naturally in your body. These are known as hormone receptor-positive cancers.
Chemotherapy involves using anti-cancer (cytotoxic) medicine to kill cancer cells. It's usually used after surgery to destroy any cancer cells that have not been removed. This is called adjuvant chemotherapy.
Radiotherapy uses controlled doses of radiation to kill cancer cells. It's usually given after surgery and chemotherapy to kill any remaining cancer cells. If you need radiotherapy, your treatment will begin about a month after your surgery or chemotherapy to give your body a chance to recover.
This blog continues our discussions about the treatments of breast cancer. To find out if the cancer has spread, a procedure called a sentinel lymph node biopsy may be done. The sentinel lymph nodes are the first lymph nodes that the cancer cells reach if they spread. They're part of the lymph nodes under your arms (axillary lymph nodes).
This blog continues our discussion of the different treatments for breast cancer. A mastectomy is the removal of all the breast tissue, including the nipple. If there are no obvious signs that the cancer has spread to your lymph nodes, you may have a mastectomy, where your breast is removed, along with a sentinel lymph node biopsy.
In this blog we will start to talk about the different treatments for breast cancer. Breast-conserving surgery ranges from a lumpectomy or wide local excision, where the tumour and a little surrounding breast tissue is removed, to a partial mastectomy or quadrantectomy, where up to a quarter of the breast is removed.
Most breast cancers are discovered at an early stage. But a small proportion of women discover they have breast cancer after it's spread to other parts of the body (metastasis) If this is the case, the type of treatment you have may be different. Secondary cancer, also called "advanced" or "metastatic" cancer, is not curable.
This blog is an overview of the main treatments for breast cancer which are breast cancer surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, hormone therapy and targeted therapy.
You may be diagnosed with breast cancer after routine breast screening, or you may have symptoms that you've seen your GP about. In this blog we talk about the ways that a doctor will diagnose breast cancer.
