Owing to the research and advances in the field of cancer, breast cancer treatments available today are better than ever before. The choice and efficacy of a treatment are subject to the factors including the type of breast cancer, size of the tumor, its extent of spread in the body, the stage of the disease, and age of the patient. All breast cancer treatments have two main goals: to eliminate cancer and prevent the disease from coming back.

Types of breast cancer treatment

Breast cancer treatments can be divided into two parts.

• Local therapy

  Local therapy, as the name suggests, removes cancer from a local (limited) area such as the breast, lymph nodes, armpits, or the chest wall.

  This type of treatment involves a surgery with or without a radiation therapy, and it ensures that the cancer doesn’t come back to that area.

• Surgery

  Through breast cancer surgery, the entire tumor is removed from the breast. There are two basic types of surgery to remove breast cancer. Lumpectomy (also called breast-conserving surgery, partial mastectomy, or wide excision) removes the tumor and a small rim of normal tissue around the tumor while keeping the rest of the breast intact. Mastectomy, on the other hand, is a surgery wherein the entire breast is removed.

• Radiation therapy

  Radiation therapy is another form of local therapy that is performed on the patient to kill cancer cells. It is used to remove cancer cells from the body that somehow were left in or around the breast after surgery.

• Systemic therapy (adjuvant therapy)

  Systemic therapy comes to rescue a patient when the cancer cells spread out from the breast to other parts of the body. It involves medication therapies wherein medicines administered through the veins or in pill form travel throughout the body to get rid of cancer cells. As systemic therapy is used in addition to breast surgery, it is also known as adjuvant therapy. It includes the following therapies.

• Chemotherapy

  Chemotherapy is usually given after breast surgery and before radiation therapy to patients suffering from early breast cancer. To women with large tumors who need a mastectomy, chemotherapy is given before surgery. Chemotherapy drugs kill or disable cancer cells and neoadjuvant chemotherapy shrinks the tumor enough that a lumpectomy becomes an option.

• Hormone therapy

  Some breast cancer cells require female hormones (estrogen and/or progesterone) to grow. Through hormone therapy that prevents cancer cells from getting the hormones they require for growth in the body, the growth of such cells and tumors is slowed down or stopped. Hormone therapy is usually given after surgery, but some postmenopausal women require it before surgery.

• Targeted therapy

  After extensive research about the changes in cancer cells that make them grow out of control, researchers have come up with new medication that targets cell changes. These medications, given as a part of the targeted therapy, help block the growth and spread of cancer cells and work even when chemo medications don’t kill cancer cells, while causing little harm to healthy cells.

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