Planning Your Treatment

Receiving anthracycline chemotherapy for breast cancer increases heart failure risk that lasts for many years.

On Feb. 28, 2019, the FDA warned that the safety and effectiveness of robotic devices for mastectomy and other cancer surgeries have not been established.

Fewer women need to have more surgery after lumpectomy to remove early-stage breast cancer.

While treatment strategies using the Oncotype DX DCIS test weren't cost effective compared to strategies that didn't use the test, the results make it very clear that a woman's treatment preferences are extremely important to the value that a treatment has.

Research suggests that women who don't follow their medicine schedules for chronic conditions such as high blood pressure or diabetes before being diagnosed with breast cancer are twice as likely to stop taking hormonal therapy early.

Taking tamoxifen for 2 years after surgery offers long-term survival benefits for premenopausal women diagnosed with early-stage, estrogen-receptor-positive disease compared to no treatment after surgery.

A study suggests that younger women diagnosed with early-stage disease get more benefits from mastectomy than lumpectomy plus radiation, while older women get about the same benefits from either type of surgery.

A study suggests that more women are choosing to have prophylactic mastectomy because of media coverage of celebrities with breast cancer.

Ovarian suppression plus tamoxifen caused more side effects and sexual problems -- mainly in the first 2 years of treatment -- compared to tamoxifen alone.

Many young women don't think hormonal therapy is an essential treatment for breast cancer, which may be why they stop the treatment early.

ASCO has put out new guidelines on using biomarkers to make decisions about treatments after surgery for women diagnosed with early-stage invasive breast cancer.

Another study suggests that lumpectomy plus radiation may offer survival benefits for some women diagnosed with early-stage disease.

A study has found that in older women diagnosed with breast cancers larger than 5 centimeters, lumpectomy offered the same overall survival and breast cancer-specific survival rates as mastectomy.

A study suggests that Arimidex is better than tamoxifen at reducing recurrence risk in postmenopausal women diagnosed with hormone-receptor-positive DCIS.

The cavity shave margin technique reduced the number of cancers that were removed with positive margins.

A study has found that using Faslodex as the first treatment for hormone-receptor-positive, advanced-stage breast cancer offers better survival than using Arimidex as the first treatment.

In the past 10 years, more U.S. women diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer who were eligible for lumpectomy chose mastectomy or double mastectomy followed by reconstruction.

A study has found that about 25% of women who have lumpectomy have to have more surgery once their doctors have all the information about the cancer and breast tissue that was removed.

A study suggests that most women who have contralateral prophylactic mastectomy have no regrets and would make the same choice again.

A study suggests that women diagnosed with stage I hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer who have lumpectomy followed by radiation have better survival rates than women who have mastectomy alone or lumpectomy alone.

Complications are uncommon after single or double mastectomy and immediate reconstruction, though women who had double mastectomy did have more complications than women who had single mastectomy.

Women diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer in one breast who are treated with lumpectomy followed by radiation therapy have the same survival rates as women who are treated with double mastectomy.

A small study suggests that most U.S. women don't have reconstruction after mastectomy and that minority women are less likely than white women to have reconstruction.

A small, early study found that a tamoxifen gel applied directly to the breast area of women diagnosed with DCIS stopped cancer cell growth as well as tamoxifen pills and caused fewer side effects.