Less Invasive Breast cancer surgery gives new hope for patients
September 25th, 2010 - 2:05 am ICT by Aishwarya BhattSep 24 (THAINDIAN NEWS) Researchers from United States and Canada says breast cancer patients could just have some selected lymph nodes removed and they will fare just as well as those that have aggressive surgery, involving the removal of all the lymph nodes.
Normally, patients with breast cancer have all the lymph nodes removed but the new research which monitored some 5,611 breast cancer patients show that patients can be just fine with some selected lymph nodes removed.
Researchers say women who had an advanced form of breast cancer and needed mastectomy were not selected for the study.
The participants were divided into two groups with approximately the same number of women in each group. Half of the women received the less aggressive surgery while with the other half receiving the more aggressive surgery involving the removal of all the lymph nodes.
After the researchers monitored the participants over a period of 8 years, they concluded that patient survival rates were almost the same between the two groups. Doctors often remove all the lymph nodes when there is a cancer because the disease jumps from the nearest lymph node to the next. However some doctors believed that the number of nodes that needed to be removed depends on the number of lymph nodes infected.
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Tags: 8 years, breast cancer, breast cancer patients, breast cancer surgery, canada, doctors, invasive breast cancer, lymph node, lymph nodes, mastectomy, new hope, participants, patient survival rates