Breast cancer is sadly still a very common, serious health concern for women. Even now in 2019, the United States is expected to have around 268,600 new cases of breast cancer in women, according to Breastcancer.org. And as of January 2019, there are at least 3.1 million women with a history of breast cancer.
It’s not a condition anyone would want, but as the numbers show, many suffer from it regardless.
If you count yourself among those numbers, know that there are ways to treat your breast cancer. Your doctor will likely have already suggested a few. But to help make your treatment decision a little easier, consider the five following treatments.
1. Hormone Therapy
If your cancer tumors are sensitive to hormones, you might want to consider hormone therapy. This type of therapy typically involves halting estrogen in some way through one of the following methods:
- Stopping the ovaries from functioning through drugs called luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone (LH-RH) agonists
- Preventing estrogen production by taking aromatase inhibitors
- Blocking the effects of estrogen with prescription medication, such as tamoxifen
Because hormone-sensitive breast cancer tumors are usually stimulated by female hormones, such as estrogen, to grow, you can halt their growth with one of these hormone therapies.
Whatever hormone therapy you choose, though, will still involve medication, which can be expensive. You can avoid a chunk of this expense by ordering your hormone therapy medication from Canadian Med Center, an international and Canada drug center. This website will connect you to licensed pharmacies abroad where prescription prices are much lower.
From there, you can go on to having your tumors removed via surgery.
2. Surgery
Considered to be another form of breast cancer treatment, surgery is almost always coupled with other treatments. After all, you do need a way to physically remove the tumors created by the cancer. However, the type of surgery you’ll receive will depend on a couple of factors.
For the simple act of removing the breast cancer, there are two options:
- Breast-conserving surgery — Also known as a partial mastectomy, this type of surgery aims to remove only the part of the breast that has the cancer and to leave the remaining healthy tissue.
- Mastectomy — This surgery will remove the entire breast that’s been affected by breast cancer.
If the likelihood is high that your breast cancer has spread to other areas of your body, you’ll likely need surgery to remove any nearby, infected lymph nodes:
- Sentinel lymph node biopsy — A surgeon will conduct this surgery to determine if there are cancer cells in a sentinel lymph node and to lower the risk of cancer spreading.
- Axillary lymph node dissection — A surgeon will remove up to or less than 20 lymph nodes in the arm to determine how far the cancer has spread.
3. Radiation Therapy
If you’ve had surgery already for your breast cancer, then you may want to look into radiation therapy. There are two types:
- External beam breast cancer radiation — This form of radiation comes from a large machine to help kill off cancer cells.
- Internal breast cancer radiation — Unlike external beam breast cancer radiation, this radiation is created by injecting the body with radioactive cancer-killing treatments.
Either form of radiation is there to eradicate any remaining breast cancer cells in your body. So consider it as a secondary form of breast cancer treatment.
4. Chemotherapy
Depending on the following factors, you may be strongly recommended to take chemotherapy:
- Tumor typing, grading, or size
- Receptor and status type
- Number of lymph nodes and degree of involvement
- The risk of cancer spreading
When you take chemotherapy, you’ll undergo a combination of cell-killing drugs to destroy breast cancer cells and slow down the growth of others.
While effective at killing fast-growing breast cancer cells, this therapy can also cause a number of serious side effects, such as reduced red blood cell count and a weakened heart. So you should confirm with your doctor whether this treatment is the only one available to you in your current state.
5. Biologic Targeted Therapy
Usually taken in combination with chemotherapy, biologic targeted therapy impairs the breast cancer cell’s ability to grow and multiply. It involves supplying you with a drug intravenously that targets certain receptors in the breast cancer cells. Once those cells have been affected, they generally become unable to promote tumor cell growth, reducing your risk of breast cancer spreading.
As you can see, there are a number of breast cancer treatments out there for you. And now that you’ve gotten an in-depth look at several, consider them seriously. Don’t forget to talk to your doctor about your newfound knowledge either! You deserve to be in good health, so make sure you and your doctor go with the most effective treatment possible.