New Treatments

Seattle Cancer Care Alliance was formed, in part, to bring promising new research to patients faster. For the breast cancer patient, this means you will have more treatment options at SCCA than you might have elsewhere.

Cancer treatment is changing rapidly. We can offer you new and better treatments, including chemotherapy regimens that are easier to tolerate and surgical procedures that are less invasive.

The best place to be if you have breast cancer is at a comprehensive cancer center, such as SCCA, where doctors are aware of the latest in cancer care—because they do research as well as treat patients.

Your options include the following new treatments:

Radiation therapy
Women who plan to have a lumpectomy or other breast-conserving surgery may be eligible for partial breast radiation following their surgery. This is an alternative to the six weeks of daily radiation therapy that is standard treatment following a lumpectomy. To read more, see Partial breast radiation: brachytherapy.

Surgery
SCCA offers new surgical alternatives to traditional mastectomy that give better cosmetic results. One of these procedures, the donut mastopexy, is not often performed for breast cancer in the United States, but is offered by SCCA surgeons under the direction of Dr. Benjamin Anderson.

Women who choose to have a mastectomy may want to discuss a skin-sparing or nipple-sparing mastectomy with Dr. Kristine Calhoun.

If you are considering breast reconstruction after a mastectomy, you may want to ask your surgeon about a new type of reconstructive surgery called the DIEP (deep inferior epigastric perforator) flap. In this procedure, the surgeon takes skin and fat from the abdomen to recreate the breast mound, but not muscle, as in older procedures. 

Chemotherapy
Doctors and researchers at SCCA are studying new ways of delivering these powerful drugs to make them as effective as possible, and also to reduce the side effects of chemotherapy treatment. To read more, see Chemotherapy—dose density.

Our doctors and researchers are also studying the effectiveness of giving chemotherapy to women with breast cancer before their cancer surgery, rather than after.

This is called "neoadjuvant" therapy. It is appropriate for women with larger, more advanced breast cancers, and also for women whose cancer has already spread beyond the breast by the time of diagnosis. To read more, see Neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

Other new drug therapies
These include hormonal therapies used in breast cancer treatment such as tamoxifen and Arimidex.

Herceptin, a targeted therapy that has been used for years to treat some women with advanced (stage IV) breast cancer, has now been approved to treat women with early stage disease.

To read more, see Herceptin.

Clinical trials
Some promising new treatments are only available in a clinical trial. Women today have benefited from improved treatments developed because women participated in clinical trials in the past. Ask your doctor if there is a clinical trial that might be right for you.

For more information about new treatments:

• Donut mastopexy
• Hormonal therapy
• New ways of giving chemotherapy: dose density
• Neoadjuvant chemotherapy
• Herceptin

August 2007