Advanced breast cancer treatment options

Today, women with advanced breast cancer have several treatment options available to them. Generally, these treatments are aimed at lengthening life and improving or maintaining quality of life whenever possible. A medical team can help make the appropriate decisions about breast cancer treatment and follow-up care, based on the medical condition and the lifestyle women want to lead. You need to determine what treatment options will work for you by weighing the risks and benefits with your physician.

Some therapies that are available for women with advanced metastatic breast cancer include:

HORMONAL TREATMENT: A woman may have already received hormonal treatment after surgery at her initial diagnosis. Hormonal treatment for breast cancer can be used to reduce the growth or spread of breast cancer. If the cancer is found to be of the type that may be sensitive to estrogen, hormonal treatment may be able to keep estrogen from helping the cancer cells to grow and divide. The presence of estrogen receptors (message-carrying proteins that may stimulate tumor growth) in the cancerous tumor is the best way to predict a woman's response to hormonal treatment for breast cancer. If it has not already been done, your doctor can do a test to determine the estrogen receptor status of your tumor.

The hormonal treatment you and your doctor decide is right for you will depend on a number of factors, like whether you are pre-menopausal or postmenopausal. There are hormonal treatment options available for pre-menopausal women that will not be discussed here, please talk to your doctor about these options. There are several hormonal treatment options available for postmenopausal women with metastatic breast cancer that can be tailored to the lifestyle a woman wants to lead. Hormonal treatments are currently available in pill form or as a monthly intramuscular injection into the buttock. Ask your physician about these therapies.

FASLODEX is a hormonal treatment for hormone receptor-positive metastatic breast cancer in postmenopausal women whose breast cancer has returned or progressed following other antiestrogen therapy such as tamoxifen. Click here to see how FASLODEX works.

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CHEMOTHERAPY:

Chemotherapy is the use of drugs that target and destroy rapidly dividing cells, including cancer cells. It can be used in metastatic breast cancer and in locally advanced breast cancer to shrink cancerous tumors to a more manageable size for surgery. Chemotherapy is sometimes used if it is believed the breast cancer will not adequately respond to hormonal or other therapy.

Several types of chemotherapy drugs are available and may be administered by mouth or directly into the vein (intravenously). Chemotherapy drugs can be used in combinations. The best results are usually obtained when several drugs are used together, which is known as combination chemotherapy.

If you have metastatic breast cancer that has progressed following treatment with chemotherapy, learn more about another chemotherapy treatment option that may be right for you.

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BIOLOGICALLY TARGETED THERAPY: This term covers a range of options that are part of the family of cancer treatments. These therapies target specific features of cancer cells to fight cancer. Since these therapies are specific, they are intended to have less effect on normal cells, which may reduce the chance of side effects, like those caused by current cancer treatments. For example, one specific treatment targets breast cancer cells that make too much of a protein called HER2/neu. This can cause the HER2/neu proteins to stop working, in which case the tumor cells are less able to grow. Other biologically targeted agents are under investigation and are only available through clinical trials.

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RADIATION THERAPY: Radiation therapy uses penetrating beams of high-energy waves or streams of particles to kill and hinder the growth of cancer cells. In metastatic disease, radiation is most commonly used to treat symptoms of breast cancer that has spread to the bone.

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SURGERY: This treatment is not typically used to treat advanced breast cancer, but it may be used in local recurrence. Surgery permits diagnostic tissue removal. In some cases, a physician may recommend surgery to remove tissue from the breast or lymph node(s).

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LOCAL THERAPY: Local therapy is directed only at the cancer cells in the breast area. Surgery and radiation are the two local therapies for treating breast cancer. Local therapies treat only a specific area of the body and they are often used in combination with systemic therapy. Systemic therapy may be used to help reduce the risk for recurrence after local therapy is completed.

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SYSTEMIC THERAPY: Systemic therapy is the use of medications that travel in the bloodstream to affect or treat cancer cells. Systemic therapies are often used in combination with local therapy in early breast cancer. They may also be used alone in more advanced stages, when cancer has spread to other parts of the body. Hormonal treatment, chemotherapy, and novel targeted therapy are the different types of systemic therapies used to treat breast cancer.

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