There has been much recognition of Angelina Jolie’s public revelation that she has had a prophylactic double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery to avoid breast cancer. She says that although the decision was hard, she made the right choice for herself; that she looks good and feels whole, again. As a gorgeous famous woman and sex symbol, her public sharing is seen as a generous move towards destigmatising breast cancer and a gracious concern for women who might face similar dilemmas. 

But what does “similar” really mean here? We think that Jolie has inadvertently added to the notion that breast cancer is a genetic disease, which is not helpful for most women. In reality, her particular story of genetic breast cancer has relevance for very few women, and to the degree that this relevance is not understood, her disclosure may be more harmful than it is helpful. 

Jolie has had Hollywood-style access to the best medical treatments that money can buy, and to incredible publicity given her fame. It must be recognised, however that most women across the globe do not have access to the same level of health care that was and is available to her. We will take the publicised opening she has created and use breast cancer to shine a clear lens on the environmental hazards and damage that play a role in compromising the health of all of our bodies, along with the planet. 

BRCA mutation 

Jolie has the BRCA1 gene mutation. This mutation is extremely rare. It most often is found in Ashkenazi Jews. Genetic mutations such as this make up about five to ten percent of breast cancers. There is harm in not recognising the true rarity of this mutation because breast cancer is not a uniformly genetically inherited disease. And even for those of us with the BRCA1 mutation, and both of us – including us, mother and daughter – with a BRCA mutation, the mutation is a pre-disposition that greatly increases risk, but does not completely determine the disease. Triggers are often needed to activate the disease - and these are largely environmental. You can have the BRCA mutation and not get breast cancer. And, most importantly, you can not have the BRCA mutation and still get breast cancer. 

We are not biological/genetic determinists nor environmental determinists, because neither can be fully understood as cancer risk in isolation from each other. 

Breast cancer is complex and it is “man-made” (See Zillah’s discussion of this in her Man-Made Breast Cancers, 2001). Nothing about it is neutral or singular. There are multiple kinds of breast cancers and many lenses - social, cultural, medical, demographic - through which to define and classify these types. In such a plural disease, there are many directives that can make sense. The breast is already culturally and psychically filled with meanings. Culture and its practices are always in place and define treatment protocols - detection and treatment are never merely scientific. 

Many of the dominant and popularised discourses of breast cancer parade themselves as scientific and dis-inform as much as they inform, and create false closure and dichotomies when openness and complexity is needed. Much caution is needed in these discussions to avoid unnecessary melodrama, and honest complexity is more helpful to sort out both one’s fear and one’s choices. 

I have lost two sisters at a very young age to breast and ovarian cancer and have suffered the pain and agony of these diseases myself. And yet, Sarah and I think that breast cancer suffers from too much exceptionalism as a disease. More than one woman dies every minute across the globe from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Poverty prevents most of the globe’s women from having access to cancer screening and the treatment options needed. 

You are not born with breast cancer - so there needs to be a focus on the environments that trigger and enable it to grow and spread. Breast tissue appears to be more vulnerable to damage from carcinogens, pesticides, radiation, biopsy needles and so on. There is some evidence that breasts may be more susceptible to carcinogens than other parts of the body. 

Individual detection is important. Individual options are key. But more important than either of these is a determination to focus on the environmental and changeable determinants of cancer. Access to detection and to treatments also must be put more fully on the agenda. This demands a politics that addresses poverty, the drug industry, health insurance, and more. 

Breast cancer, rather than seeing it as simply an individual problem with an individual solution – which it is - also needs to imagine the political/biological problem created by the food and tobacco industry, the militarised and corporatist complex and industrial polluters. Use the breast as an interior site for the exterior globe and its coming environmental destruction. 

What of the women in Congo and Iraq and Afghanistan who suffer the destruction of their environments in war? Without medical care their bodies are endangered to everything, including breast cancer. Here in the US, women without health insurance have little chance at preventive or diagnostic care, let alone a $3,000-test for the BRCA gene. The cost of reconstructive surgery is also often well out of reach. 

Aftermath of mastectomy 

Let us also be reminded that women can choose widely about how they deal with the aftermath of mastectomy. I am remembering the intrepid black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde who, after her mastectomy in 1978, bravely rejected the use of a breast prosthesis (that came in only white flesh colour at the time). She thought that wearing a prosthesis was a form of lying, of covering up the trauma of breast cancer. As she wrote in The Cancer Journals, she would be a militant one-breasted woman rather than practice what felt like self-deceit. She wanted breast cancer to remain visible. Of course, lumpectomy has sometimes changed the issue of (in)visibility. 

I have had a double mastectomy and reconstructed my chest and cleavage with my own muscle rather than through reconstructive surgery. Two of my closest friends have done the same. Sarah, who has annual MRI breast screenings at 28 years old, continues to hope for new breakthroughs both in terms of disease prevention and treatment, and reconstruction. There are too few choices for all breast cancer patients, and yet also many personal narratives to be built and listened to. 

And what of public health? There remain bigger issues in breast cancer and public health than ensuring access to testing for the BRCA1 mutation. Other interventions – access to screenings, ensuring cleaner environments, establishing health care networks - will potentially save more lives than BRCA testing. So let us think bigger than the breast. Think about a world when corporations make money by preventing disease instead of screening for them. This means changing the medical and pharmaceutical industries of and for profit. This means protecting all our environments from harm. 

Let us really get serious about preventing breast cancer. This means ending industrial farming with its insecticides and herbicides. This means addressing and redressing climate change and global warming. This means no fracking for natural gas and contaminating water supplies.  

Dream and hope for vaccinations for all everywhere; mosquito netting wherever needed, health screenings from mammograms to pap smears free of charge. Treatments will be available to all who need them. Healthy bodies will be a human right. Maybe in this world we will no longer need either pink or red ribbons. 

We have travelled from Jolie’s breast cancer to the health of the globe. Fellow friends and activists Eve Ensler and Sandra Steingraber make similar cancer journeys, but from different body parts. Meanwhile, Sarah and I with our BRCA1 mutations remain determined to de-essentialise breast cancer and work towards a radically improved public health.

Zillah Eisenstein has written feminist theory in North America for the past 30 years. She writes in order to engage in political struggles for social justice across the globe. She is an internationally renowned writer and activist and Distinguished Scholar of Anti-Racist Feminist Political Theory at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York. Her most recent books with Zed Press, London include: The Audacity of Races and Genders (2009); Sexual Decoys, Gender, Race and War (2007); and Against Empire (2004).

Sarah Eisenstein Stumbar received her MPH from Columbia University (2008) and her MD from SUNY at Stony Brook School of Medicine (2012). She is currently a resident physician in the Department of Social and Family Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, New York. She has been a breast cancer and AIDS activist in national and international forums for the past 15 years. 

1500

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

IRVINE, Calif., May 23, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — More than half of women diagnosed with early theatre breast cancer might not advantage from chemotherapy and still have glorious outcomes. To teach women, Agendia, Inc. has announced a launch of one of a largest sources of online consumer information about breast cancer genomic tests. The new website and interactive Facebook page yield recently diagnosed women with information sources, to assistance them establish if they can safely equivocate chemotherapy.

“We expect these innovative amicable media campaigns will inspire some-more patients to ask their oncologists and breast surgeons about a Symphony genomic exam panel,” pronounced David Macdonald, Agendia’s Chief Executive Officer. “Women who have been told they have early theatre breast cancer mostly face a tough preference per either or not they should have chemotherapy after surgery. They are looking for current, simply accepted information to support their decision. As many women have already told us, a new website and Facebook page grasp that critical goal.”

The website (www.KnowYourBreastCancer.com) provides information in layperson terms about a singular inlet of any breast cancer tumor, and how genomic testing, with a exam row such as a Symphony apartment from Agendia, can assistance urge diagnosis and treatment.

The new Facebook page outlines a launch of a Symphony Sisterhood, with online information and support for women who have early theatre breast cancer. The page, during www.Facebook.com/SymphonySisterhood uses Facebook interactivity, that has authorised women to post their breast cancer stories, training from others who have benefited from genomic contrast and done prepared decisions on either to bear several treatments. Links and some-more information are also accessible around Twitter during www.Twitter.com/SymphonySister.

Here’s what a few women from a Symphony Sisterhood Facebook page have to contend about this new site:

Vicki Waddill: “I am vehement about a information this website has supposing and demeanour brazen to gripping updated on new discoveries in a quarrel opposite breast cancer.  All women need to be wakeful of this site!”

Marie Miano: “The exam is really a good thing.  My chemo was creatively going to be usually 2 drugs, yet a exam showed my cancer was assertive even yet it was not in my lymph nodes so my oncologist motionless on a 3-drug treatment.  we would suggest a exam to anyone, in sequence to assistance them and their doctors as to what form of diagnosis they should have.”

Debbie Warren:  “I support all a testing!  The some-more we know about your possess body, a improved treatments you’re going to have and tailored to only you!”

“Online resources can be of poignant value to patients. My colleagues and we mostly inspire patients to examination information that’s accessible online from arguable sources such as this one,” pronounced Beth B. DuPree, MD, FACS, ABIHM a remarkable Philadelphia breast surgeon and medical executive of a breast health module of a Holy Redeemer Health System. “It’s really useful for newly diagnosed women with breast cancer to learn some-more about a purpose that genomic contrast can play in enlightening their diagnosis and treatment.”

“Too many women diagnosed with breast cancer assume that undergoing chemotherapy is a existence of their condition,” pronounced Agendia’s David Macdonald. “Our company’s idea is to commission these patients to teach themselves and to ask for absolute collection during their disposal, like a Symphony apartment of tests, to establish if they indeed need to bear these mostly debilitating and dear treatments. We trust that eventually a prolongation of that believe around amicable media educational resources will gangling thousands of women a nonessential poisonous effects of chemotherapy, and will gangling multitude a weight of administering ineffectual treatments”

Genomic testing looks during a activity of groups of genes within growth hankie to yield a some-more extensive perspective of a specific cancer. Agendia’s MammaPrint^® genomic exam (part of a Symphony row of tests) can, for example, establish if a lady with early theatre breast cancer is definitively during low risk or high risk of recurrence. According to a recently published RASTER study, 97% of women identified as low risk by MammaPrint^® and who chose not to have chemotherapy were disease-free during 5 years. 

About Agendia:

Agendia is a heading molecular evidence association that develops and markets paraffin-based (FFPE) genomic evidence products. Agendia’s breast cancer Symphony apartment was grown regulating unprejudiced gene selection, examining a finish tellurian genome, ensuring 100% decisive formula for cancer patients. Together, a Symphony tests assistance physicians establish a patient’s particular risk for metastasis, that patients will advantage from chemo, hormonal or multiple therapy, and that patients can instead be treated with reduction strenuous and reduction dear methods. www.agendia.com

Additional information for breast cancer patients and their circles of support is accessible during www.KnowYourBreastCancer.com and www.Facebook.com/SymphonySisterhood

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DUBLIN–(BUSINESS WIRE)–

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/c72s5s/global_breast)
has announced a further of a “Global
Breast Cancer Pipeline Capsule – 2013″ news to their offering.

Fore Pharma’s latest news Global Breast Cancer Pipeline Capsule –
2013′ provides present information on pivotal Research and Development
(RD) activities in a tellurian breast cancer market. It covers active
breast cancer tube molecules in clinical trials, preclinical
research, and drug discovery.

This news helps executives lane aspirant tube molecules. The
tube information presented in this news can be used for identifying
partners, evaluating opportunities, formulating business development
strategies, and executing in-licensing and out-licensing deals.

The range of a news includes information on breast cancer pipeline
molecules by clinical hearing stages, company, resource of action, and
nation (The US, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, UK, Japan, and Rest of
a World). Breast cancer tube molecules chartering activities are
also lonesome in this report.

Key Features of a Report:

– Breast cancer Pipeline Overview

– Breast cancer Phase 3 Clinical Trial Pipeline

– Breast cancer Phase 2 Clinical Trial Pipeline

– Breast cancer Phase 1 Clinical Trial Pipeline

– Breast cancer Preclinical Research Pipeline

– Breast cancer Drug Discovery Stage Pipeline

– Breast cancer Pipeline in a U.S.

– Breast cancer Pipeline in Europe

– Licensing Activities in Global Breast Cancer Market

Key Topics Covered:

1. Breast Cancer – Disease Overview

2. Breast Cancer Pipeline Overview

3. Breast Cancer Pipeline by Geography

4. Breast Cancer Phase 3 Clinical Trial Pipeline Insights

5. Breast Cancer Phase 2 Clinical Trial Pipeline Insights

6. Breast Cancer Phase 1 Clinical Trial Pipeline Insights

7. Breast Cancer Preclinical Research Pipeline Insights

8. Breast Cancer Drug Discovery Pipeline Insights

9. Breast Cancer Market – Licensing Activities

10. Appendix

11. Research Methodology

List of Tables and Figures

For some-more information revisit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/c72s5s/global_breast

About Research and Markets

Research and Markets is a world’s heading source for international
marketplace investigate reports and marketplace data. We yield we with a latest
information on general and informal markets, pivotal industries, a top
companies, new products and a latest trends.

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Nite of Hope’s best year yet
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There has been many approval of Angelina Jolie’s open explanation that she has had a preventative double mastectomy and reconstructive medicine to equivocate breast cancer . She says that nonetheless a preference was hard, she finished a right choice for herself; that she looks good and feels whole, again. As a beautiful famous lady and sex symbol, her open pity is seen as a inexhaustible pierce towards destigmatising breast cancer and a friendly regard for women who competence face identical dilemmas. 

But what does “similar” unequivocally meant here? We consider that Jolie has inadvertently combined to a idea that breast cancer is a genetic disease, that is not useful for many women. In reality, her sold story of genetic breast cancer has aptitude for unequivocally few women, and to a grade that this aptitude is not understood, her avowal might be some-more damaging than it is helpful. 

Jolie has had Hollywood-style entrance to a best medical treatments that income can buy, and to implausible broadside given her fame. It contingency be recognised, however that many women opposite a creation do not have entrance to a same turn of health caring that was and is accessible to her. We will take a publicised opening she has combined and use breast cancer to gleam a transparent lens on a environmental hazards and repairs that play a purpose in compromising a health of all of a bodies, along with a planet. 

BRCA mutation 

Jolie has a BRCA1 gene mutation. This turn is intensely rare. It many mostly is found in Ashkenazi Jews . Genetic mutations such as this make adult about 5 to 10 percent of breast cancers. There is mistreat in not recognising a loyal monument of this turn since breast cancer is not a regularly genetically hereditary disease. And even for those of us with a BRCA1 mutation, and both of us – including us, mom and daughter – with a BRCA mutation, a turn is a pre-disposition that severely increases risk, though does not totally establish a disease. Triggers are mostly indispensable to activate a disease - and these are mostly environmental. You can have a BRCA turn and not get breast cancer. And, many importantly, we can not have a BRCA turn and still get breast cancer. 

We are not biological/genetic determinists nor environmental determinists, since conjunction can be entirely accepted as cancer risk in siege from any other. 

Breast cancer is formidable and it is “man-made” (See Zillah’s contention of this in her Man-Made Breast Cancers , 2001). Nothing about it is neutral or singular. There are mixed kinds of breast cancers and many lenses - social, cultural, medical, demographic - by that to conclude and systematise these types. In such a plural disease, there are many directives that can make sense. The breast is already culturally and psychically filled with meanings. Culture and a practices are always in place and conclude diagnosis protocols - showing and diagnosis are never merely scientific. 

Many of a widespread and popularised discourses of breast cancer march themselves as systematic and dis-inform as many as they inform, and emanate fake closure and dichotomies when honesty and complexity is needed. Much counsel is indispensable in these discussions to equivocate nonessential melodrama, and honest complexity is some-more useful to arrange out both one’s fear and one’s choices. 

I have mislaid dual sisters during a unequivocally immature age to breast and ovarian cancer and have suffered a pain and anguish of these diseases myself. And yet, Sarah and we consider that breast cancer suffers from too many exceptionalism as a disease. More than one lady dies each notation  across a creation from causes associated to pregnancy and childbirth. Poverty prevents many of a globe’s women from carrying entrance to cancer screening and a diagnosis options needed. 

You are not innate with breast cancer - so there needs to be a concentration on a environments that trigger and capacitate it to grow and spread. Breast hankie appears to be some-more exposed to repairs from carcinogens, pesticides, radiation, biopsy needles and so on. There is some justification that breasts might be some-more receptive to carcinogens than other tools of a body. 

Individual showing is important. Individual options are key. But some-more critical than possibly of these is a integrity to concentration on a environmental and fanciful determinants of cancer. Access to showing and to treatments also contingency be put some-more entirely on a agenda. This final a politics that addresses poverty, a drug industry, health insurance, and more. 

Breast cancer, rather than saying it as simply an particular problem with an particular resolution – that it is - also needs to suppose a political/biological problem combined by a food and tobacco industry, a militarised and corporatist formidable and industrial polluters. Use a breast as an interior site for a extraneous creation and a entrance environmental destruction. 

What of a women in Congo and Iraq and Afghanistan who humour a drop of their environments in war? Without medical caring their bodies are involved to everything, including breast cancer. Here in a US, women though health word have small possibility during surety or evidence care, let alone a $3,000-test for a BRCA gene. The cost of reconstructive medicine is also mostly good out of reach. 

Aftermath of mastectomy 

Let us also be reminded that women can select widely about how they understanding with a emanate of mastectomy. we am remembering a courageous black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde who, after her mastectomy in 1978, bravely deserted a use of a breast prosthesis (that came in usually white strength colour during a time). She suspicion that wearing a prosthesis was a form of lying, of covering adult a mishap of breast cancer. As she wrote in The Cancer Journals , she would be a belligerent one-breasted lady rather than use what felt like self-deceit. She wanted breast cancer to sojourn visible. Of course, lumpectomy has infrequently altered a emanate of (in)visibility. 

I have had a double mastectomy and reconstructed my chest and disruption with my possess flesh rather than by reconstructive surgery. Two of my closest friends have finished a same. Sarah, who has annual MRI breast screenings during 28 years old, continues to wish for new breakthroughs both in terms of illness impediment and treatment, and reconstruction. There are too few choices for all breast cancer patients, and nonetheless also many personal narratives to be built and listened to. 

And what of open health? There sojourn bigger issues in breast cancer and open health than ensuring entrance to contrast for a BRCA1 mutation. Other interventions – entrance to screenings, ensuring cleaner environments, substantiating health caring networks - will potentially save some-more lives than BRCA testing. So let us consider bigger than a breast. Think about a universe when companies make income by preventing illness instead of screening for them. This means changing a medical and curative industries of and for profit. This means safeguarding all a environments from harm. 

Let us unequivocally get critical about preventing breast cancer. This means finale industrial tillage with a insecticides and herbicides. This means addressing and redressing meridian change and tellurian warming. This means no fracking for healthy gas and contaminating H2O supplies.  

Dream and wish for vaccinations for all everywhere; butterfly concealment wherever needed, health screenings from mammograms to mix smears giveaway of charge. Treatments will be accessible to all who need them. Healthy bodies will be a tellurian right. Maybe in this universe we will no longer need possibly pinkish or red ribbons. 

We have trafficked from Jolie’s breast cancer to a health of a globe. Fellow friends and activists Eve Ensler  and Sandra Steingraber make identical cancer journeys, though from opposite physique parts. Meanwhile, Sarah and we with a BRCA1 mutations sojourn dynamic to de-essentialise breast cancer and work towards a radically softened open health.

Zillah Eisenstein has created feminist speculation in North America for a past 30 years. She writes in sequence to rivet in domestic struggles for amicable probity opposite a globe. She is an internationally eminent author and romantic and Distinguished Scholar of Anti-Racist Feminist Political Theory during Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York. Her many new books with Zed Press, London include: The Audacity of Races and Genders (2009); Sexual Decoys, Gender, Race and War (2007); and Against Empire (2004).

Sarah Eisenstein Stumbar perceived her MPH from Columbia University (2008) and her MD from SUNY during Stony Brook School of Medicine (2012). She is now a proprietor medicine in a Department of Social and Family Medicine during Montefiore Medical Center in a Bronx, New York. She has been a breast cancer and AIDS romantic in inhabitant and general forums for a past 15 years. 

credit

Treating breast cancer almost always involves surgery, and for years the choice was to have the lump or the whole breast removed. Now, new approaches are dramatically changing the way these operations are done, giving women more options, faster treatment, smaller scars, fewer long-term side effects and better cosmetic results.

It has led to a new specialty – “oncoplastic” surgery – combining oncology, which focuses on cancer treatment, and plastic surgery to restore a patient’s appearance.

“Cosmetics is very important” and can help a woman recover psychologically as well as physically, said Dr. Deanna Attai, a Burbank, Calif., surgeon who is on the board of directors of the American Society of Breast Surgeons. Its annual meeting in Chicago earlier this month featured many of these new approaches.

And they’re in the news this week – actress Angelina Jolie revealed she had both breasts removed preventively because she carries a gene that puts her at high risk of developing breast cancer. She was able to preserve her nipples and had a series of operations to reconstruct her breasts with implants. There have been many advances and “results can be beautiful,” she wrote in a personal essay in The New York Times.

Some of those advances:

More women are getting chemotherapy or hormone therapy before surgery to shrink large tumours enough to let them have a breast-conserving operation instead of a mastectomy. Fewer lymph nodes are being removed to check for cancer’s spread, sparing women painful arm swelling for years afterward.

Newer ways to rebuild breasts have made mastectomy a more appealing option for some women. More of them are getting immediate reconstruction with an implant at the same time the cancer is removed rather than several operations that have been standard for many years. Skin and nipples increasingly are being preserved for more natural results.

Some doctors are experimenting with operating on breast tumours through incisions in the armpit to avoid breast scars. There’s even a “Goldilocks” mastectomy for large-breasted women – not too much or too little removed, and using excess skin to create a “just right” natural implant.

Finally, doctors are testing a way to avoid surgery altogether, destroying small tumours by freezing them with a probe through the skin.

“Breast surgery has become more minimalistic,” said Dr. Shawna Willey of Georgetown’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Women have more options. It’s much more complex decision-making.”

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women around the world. In the United States alone, about 230,000 new cases are diagnosed each year.

Most can be treated by just having the lump removed, but that requires radiation for weeks afterward to kill any stray cancer cells in the breast, plus frequent mammograms to watch for a recurrence.

Many women don’t want the worry or the radiation, and choose mastectomy even though they could have less drastic surgery. Mastectomy rates have been rising. Federal law requires insurers to cover reconstruction for mastectomy patients, and many of the improvements in surgery are aimed at making it less disfiguring.

Here are some of the major trends:

Immediate reconstruction

Doctors used to think it wasn’t good to start reconstruction until cancer treatment had ended – surgery, chemotherapy, radiation. Women would have a mastectomy, which usually involves taking the skin and the nipple along with all the breast tissue, followed by operations months later to rebuild the breast.

Reconstruction can use tissue from the back or belly, or an implant. The first operation often is to place a tissue expander, a balloon-like device that’s gradually inflated to stretch the remaining skin and make room for the implant. A few months later, a second surgery is done to remove the expander and place the implant. Once that heals, a third operation is done to make a new nipple, followed by tattooing to make an areola, the darkened ring around it.

The new trend is immediate reconstruction, with the first steps started at the time of the mastectomy, either to place a tissue expander or an implant. In some cases, the whole thing can be done in one operation.

In the U.S., about 25 to 30 per cent of women get immediate reconstruction. At the Mayo Clinic, about half do, and at Georgetown, it’s about 80 per cent.

Sparing skin, nipples

Doctors usually take the skin when they do a mastectomy to make sure they leave no cancer behind. But in the last decade they increasingly have left the skin in certain women with favourable tumour characteristics. Attai compares it to removing the inside of an orange while leaving the peel intact.

“We have learned over time that you can save skin” in many patients, Willey said. “Every single study has shown that it’s safe.”

Now doctors are going the next step: preserving the nipple, which is even more at risk of being involved in cancer than the skin is. Only about 5 per cent of women get this now, but eligibility could be expanded if it proves safe. The breast surgery society has a registry on nipple-sparing mastectomies that will track such women for 10 years.

“You really have to pick patients carefully,” because no one wants to compromise cancer control for cosmetic reasons, Attai said.

“The preliminary data are that nipple-sparing is quite good,” but studies haven’t been long enough to know for sure, Willey said. “It makes a huge difference in the cosmetic outcome. That makes the woman’s breast recognizable to her.”

Dr. Judy Boughey, a breast surgeon at the Mayo Clinic, said the new approach even has swayed patients’ treatment choices.

“We’re seeing women choosing the more invasive surgery, choosing the mastectomy,” because of doctors’ willingness to spare skin and nipples, she said.

It helped persuade Rose Ragona, a 51-year-old operations supervisor at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. She had both breasts removed on April 19 with the most modern approach: Immediate reconstruction, with preservation of her skin and nipples.

“To wake up and just see your breasts there helped me immensely,” she said.

She chose to have both breasts removed to avoid radiation and future worry.

“I felt it was a safer road to go,” she said. “I can’t live the rest of my life in fear. Every time there’s a lump I’m going to worry.”

Freezing tumours

Attai, the California breast surgeon, is one of the researchers in a national study testing cryoablation. The technique uses a probe cooled with liquid nitrogen that turns tumours into ice balls of dead tissue that’s gradually absorbed by the body. This has been done since 2004 for benign breast tumours and the clinical trial is aimed at seeing if it’s safe for cancer treatment.

“The technology is amazing. This is done in the office under local anesthesia, a little skin puncture,” Attai said.

In the study, women still have surgery at some point after the freezing treatment to make sure all the cancer is destroyed. If it proves safe and effective, it could eliminate surgery for certain cancer patients.

“I’d love to see the day when we can offer women with small breast tumours a completely non-operative approach, and I do think that’s coming soon,” Attai said.

Associated Press

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