Comments on: When Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Is Used in Breast Cancer Treatment in Advanced Stages Only or Early or Both?

By: inverse_mushroom_cloud

inverse_mushroom_cloud — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:42:10 +0000

According to my oncologist, only Stage 4 cancer (metastatic) is considered “advanced” with breast cancer.

Neoadjuvant therapy is used with both early-stage and advanced-stage breast cancer.

I was clinically diagnosed at 2B/3A and received neoadjuvant therapy. The chemo was extremely effective due to the particular pathology of my cancer (hormone negative, HER2-NEU positive).

By: Panda

Panda — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:34:57 +0000

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy is the term used to describe giving chemo before surgery in order to shrink it. The idea is just to make the tumor or tumors as small as possible or hopefully kill them off so that surgery is less extensive. In answer to your question it would depend on the specific breast cancer type (some are more aggressive) location of tumors, and what the treatment plan entails .. so it could be used at any stage.
After surgery when there is no evidence of disease chemotherapy can be given too to take care of microscopic disease . . this is called Adjuvant chemotherapy.

By: sunflowers

sunflowers — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 17:54:11 +0000

I don’t know what you mean by “neoadjuvant” chemo. Chemo is used when the size and type of the tumor call for it.

Here is a link to breast cancer staging and treatment. Don’t forget to turn the pages. It is important to ask the oncologist what are the statistics on how many women survive at that stage with chemo and how many women survive at that stage who refuse chemo. Sometimes it is not a very big difference. Sometimes only 1% more survive who do the chemo…5 years later. But the figures are different for different stages and types of cancers.
http://www.webmd.com/breast-cancer/treatments-stage