Your Wellness with NorthBay Health Experts

Your Wellness is a blog focused on general health topics and information from NorthBay's excellent cadre of health care professionals.

Know Your Breast Cancer Risk Factors

October 18, 2018
 

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Not counting some kinds of skin cancer, breast cancer in the United States is the most common cancer in women and the American Cancer Society estimates that more than 265,000 news cases will be diagnosed in women this year.

With those kinds of statistic, it's important for every woman to understand her risk of developing breast cancer, according to NorthBay Healthcare oncoplastic surgeon Jason Marengo, M.D.

"Some risk factors you can control, such as alcohol intake, weight, and physical activity. Others you cannot control such as your age, family history, and other genetic issues," Dr. Marengo said. "Knowing your risk factors can help to guide how you are screened and how often and can give you a better understanding of what you can do to prevent breast cancer."

He advised that women find out their family history, talk with their doctor and get regular mammograms.

In the event of a breast cancer diagnosis, it's also important to find the right options for treatment and surgery, he noted. And that makes it absolutely vital to find a team of experts, said Dr. Marengo. "To really benefit from all of the advances in cancer care, you need a multidisciplinary team that communicates well and meets often," he said.

Oncoplastic surgery is the result of an evolution of treatment in breast cancer cases. From the time when surgery meant removal of all the breast tissue, pectoralis and lymph nodes, treatment has evolved to less aggressive options in which surgeons can "remove much less of the breast tissue, combined with radiation and see patients have equivalent survival outcomes to breast removal," explained Dr. Marengo. "And a leap forward is to have, at the same time that tissue is removed in a lumpectomy, the ability to immediately reconstruct that lumpectomy defect to minimize the outcome of radiation, which will sometimes distort the breast."

Historically, breast cancer surgery would precede any chemotherapy or radiation. Today, doctors can look at individual tumors and decide if they will benefit from chemotherapy even before surgery, so that you remove less of the breast tissue (in surgery), he explained.

Deciding which treatment plan to follow, is where the team approach to care is vital, he said. "It is not enough to take singular techniques - whether it's gene assays in tumors, genetic screening, or radiation oncology. If those are used individually in isolation and not to create a comprehensive plan, you are not getting the care you deserve. You need a tumor board that meets often and a group of physicians that are talking often about designing these personalized treatment plans."

Having a board-certified plastic surgeon early in the care decision can be key. "They can give perspective on if the patient is a candidate to have some localized tissue used to reconstruct that defect prior to radiation," Dr. Marengo said. That matters, he added, because radiation can change the blood supply to the affected area of the breast.

 

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