“But I can’t feel it when I check,” she protested.
“That’s a good thing,” her doctor replied. “If it is cancer, we’ve probably caught it in time, before it grows into something you can feel.”
A biopsy proved it was malignant. All of a sudden Margareta, then 66, an independent mother and grandmother, found herself thrust into a vast club she would much rather not be part of: women with breast cancer. An estimated one in every eight women around the world will develop the disease in their lifetime, with the latest statistics indicating that 1.7 million were diagnosed in 2012 alone.
Margareta didn’t even consider a lumpectomy: early in the treatment, her doctor asked if she would like to be part of a local trial into a procedure called ‘preferential radiofrequency ablation,’ or PRFA, which is based on the principle that cancer cells can be killed by heating them up. Her age—and the tiny size of the tumor—fitted the trial’s criteria; while there was no guarantee it would work, there would be no cutting into her breast and zero recovery time. She would be given a local anesthetic and the whole thing would last no more than 20 minutes.
It sounded exciting, like something out of science fiction. Margareta would still undergo minor surgery to remove the dead tissue a few weeks after having the procedure so scientists could examine it, have radiation to ensure the cancer was gone for good and be prescribed a drug called tamoxifen to prevent it recurring. But she knew she would be helping women diagnosed in the future perhaps avoid the operating table altogether.
“Absolutely, I’ll do it,” she said.
PRFA is but one of a number of new breast cancer treatments that are being tested on patients right now. They represent a radical departure from the standard ‘one size fits all’ medical approach: cut off a whole breast or at least excise part of it, then radiate, then, if the tumor was really aggressive, use chemotherapy, making the overall treatment a trifecta for side effects such as nausea, hair loss and brain fog.
As recently as 50 years ago, scientists thought most tumors were alike and there were few treatment options outside of surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Around one in four people survived cancer, compared to half today. In the 1970s, in the first glimmer of exciting changes to come, doctors began to test new treatments such as ‘precision’ drugs like tamoxifen and then trastuzumab, a laboratory-produced antibody treatment better known by its brand name, Herceptin, which can stop cancer cells from growing.
Content continues below ad
Today, thanks to advances in genetic testing, we know even more about breast cancer. A landmark 2012 study undertaken by scientists at Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Institute, for example, proved that the disease can be divided into ten different sub-groups, each of which may respond to different combinations of drugs, non-invasive treatments, surgery or, in the case of tumors that grow really slowly, no treatment at all. We know about gene mutations, both acquired and inherited, and the possible effects of hormonal levels and smoking on developing cancer. At this stage, there is also clear evidence that alcohol consumption, excess weight and a lack of exercise increases this risk of developing breast cancer.
“We are continuing to develop methods to detect tumors earlier, and to find new telltale markers in order to help doctors better tailor treatment,” says Dr Áine McCarthy, the organization’s senior science information officer. When physicians know exactly what they’re dealing with, be it an ER positive tumor (which grows in response to female hormones), for example, or a HER2 positive tumor (one which has large amounts of the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 protein on the surface of the cancer cells) it makes all the difference in helping doctors develop a treatment plan.
Even more recently, an international study published last spring in the journal, Nature, examined in minute detail the genomes in 560 breast cancers, sifting through billions of letters of code to find the mutations in each case. While this research led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, is not a new cure, it represents a giant leap toward treatment that is tailored, not just a specific kind of cancer, but for each patient.
“All cancers are due to mutations that occur in all of us in the DNA of our cells during the course of our lifetimes,” said Professor Sir Mike Stratton, director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. “This study brings us much closer to a complete description of the changes in DNA in breast cancer and thus to a comprehensive understanding of the causes of the disease and the opportunities for new treatments.”
Patient, Heal Thyself
The immune system is a mysterious thing that can swoop in to heal your common cold and cause autoimmune conditions such as arthritis and type I diabetes. Now, researchers like Dr. Pam Ohashi, director of the tumor immunotherapy program at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, are trying to harness its power to combat breast cancer. The idea is to stimulate one’s own immune system to work harder and attack cancer cells.
“There are these molecules called ‘checkpoint inhibitors’ which act as stop signals and regulate the immune system,” explains Dr Ohashi. Clinical trials in certain types of cancer that naturally induce a strong immune response—such as melanoma—have tested drugs that block these negative signals, and the results have shown that releases the body’s T cells, the foot soldiers of the immune system, to go fight tumors.
Content continues below ad
“We’re trying to see if the same principle works with breast cancer,” Dr Ohashi says. Patients in clinical trials are getting immune therapy as a last resort after other, proven treatments have not worked.
Once scientists have figured out how to make the immune system work better, immune therapy may be given to breast cancer patients early on, thus allowing them to skip chemotherapy and/or radiation.
“The notion of using the immune system to treat cancer has shown unprecedented success,” Dr Ohashi says. “Combined with other strategies, it has the potential to cure cancer. That could be ten years down the road, but the time has now come to think of it as a reality.”
Cooling Things Down
The idea is simple: cool a tumor and the surrounding tissue to the point that the cells within freeze, let the cells burst their cell boundaries or ‘pop’ like a full can of frozen soft drink, and after the malignant ones rupture they are harmlessly reabsorbed into the tissue. An Israeli invention, the IceSense3 machine, which requires a needle to be inserted into the breast tumor, is being tested in patient trials across 20 sites in the US and in one in Japan. The machine is also being tested in Europe and Hong Kong.
Already successful in kidney, liver and lung cancer treatments, the procedure, which is currently limited to women aged 65 and over with breast tumors that are no more than one and a half centimetres in diameter, takes up to a half-hour and requires only a local anesthetic.
“You turn the machine on once the needle is placed, and the needle gets cold in about 20 seconds,” says Will Irby, a vice-president at the Memphis-based IceCure Medical Inc., which is marketing the machine in the U.S. “The tumor is frozen from the inside out and you can watch the ice ball being formed with the help of an ultrasound.”
Dr. Richard Fine, the director of education and research at the Margaret West Comprehensive Breast Center, a component of the West Cancer Center in Memphis, notes the procedure is non-surgical, and indeed its goal is to replace the surgical treatment of the breast cancer. Additional treatments such as radiation may be recommended on a case-by-case basis. “The patient will still feel a lump for about six months, as the dead cells are being re-absorbed and the changes caused by the cryo-ablation are being resolved,” he says. “After that we do a mammogram where we can see normal breast tissue surrounded by a narrow white outline, which surrounds the zone of treatment.”
For Freehold, New Jersey resident Muriel Smith, having the procedure on February 2 was ‘a piece of cake’—so easy, in fact, she hopped off the table at the medical center, donned her shirt and went off to a lunch date. Diagnosed on December 17, 2015, she opted for cryo-ablation over surgery because the latter required so much more effort and someone would have had to pick her up afterwards.
“At my age, I’m not really crazy about going under anesthesia,” says the 79 year-old. “I was able to watch everything on the screen. Forty-seven days after the diagnosis, I was free of cancer.” Muriel’s next appointment is in August, for a mammogram, and she has to have one each year for the next five years.
Content continues below ad
Heatings Things Up
For preferential radiofrequency ablation, or PRFA—the procedure that Margareta Nordell had—the physician first carefully guides a needle into the tumor with the help of an ultrasound machine and then secures it in place using mechanical micropulses. Following that, cancer cells trying to escape through the tumor’s blood vessels are quickly killed off by the electric pulses in a process called anti-seeding
Once positioned correctly, an electric current is then conducted through the tissue via the needle, resulting in mechanical friction which quickly heats the cells up and kills or damages them depending on the temperature—when these cells do scatter, they don’t grow, and therefore they can do no damage, says Hans Wiksell, a professor emeritus at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet who is also the lead scientist on the project and built the PRFA machine. The electrode-needle brings the central body of the tumor to 70 degrees C, which quickly kills all the cells within, while the temperature in the zone immediately outside of the tumor is ideally 43 degrees, where non-cancerous cells can repair the damage but cancerous ones will not.
“The wonderful thing is that the precision and control involved create a completely different mechanism to treat breast cancer,” Professor Wiksell says. “You can get cancer from chemotherapy and radiation. Nuclear bombs can cause cancer but heat can’t.”
So far, the current trial has tested the procedure on 18 older patients, including Margareta, with tumors that are no more than two centimetres in depth, and has boasted a high success rate, where participants have not seen regressions. The trial is limited because older patients tend to have tumors that aren’t as virulent and fast-spreading as those in younger ones.
Now cancer-free for five years, she says: “I’m very lucky and grateful that I could be in this trial. I can be there for my daughter, for my three grandchildren and for Jackie, my Jack Russell terrier. I can keep on living.”
from Reader's Digest http://ift.tt/2lpHDaw
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق