Study finds some early breast cancers may not need surgery

Some women with the earliest stages of breast cancer could be carefully monitored, undergoing surgery and radiation only if the disease advances, new data suggests.

"The strategy is akin to one already used in early prostate cancer, as doctors are increasingly looking at whether they can pull back on some cancer therapies, to spare patients side effects and costs," reported The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

"This is really the first study to confirm our suspicions that there's a subset of low-risk patients that could do just as well without surgery," said Nancy Chan, a breast-cancer specialist at NYU Langone's Perlmutter Cancer Center, who wasn't involved in the study. "It's really encouraging."

Some doctors said there isn't enough long-term data to prove the practice is safe. How aggressively to treat this form of early-stage cancer, and whether to call it cancer at all, is controversial.

Approximately 300,000 women in the United States are diagnosed with invasive breast cancer annually. An additional 50,000 are diagnosed with "stage zero" breast cancer, also called ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), which occurs when cancer cells are found in a woman's milk ducts but not in her breast tissue. While the disease itself poses little risk, it can develop into more dangerous, invasive cancer.

(Cover via CFP)