Patients with brain metastases from breast cancer can be treated with cranial surgery, whole brain radiation therapy, targeted therapy, or small molecule drugs that can cross the blood-brain barrier, which can also prolong survival. The most important thing is that once the brain metastasis occurs, the patient’s survival cycle is already very short.
Brain metastasis is one of the manifestations of advanced breast cancer and has a probability of occurring in about 10% of cases. Among the cases of breast cancer metastasis, breast cancer bone metastasis has the highest probability, and about 30% of HER-2-positive metastatic breast cancer may develop brain metastasis during the course of the disease. Patients with brain metastases have a survival time of less than 2 months without treatment and only 6 months if whole brain radiation therapy alone is used.
Brain metastases from breast cancer are among the very serious, short survival time, and very difficult to treat metastases from all sites of advanced breast cancer. Because of the unique nature of the cranial brain, a small metastasis can cause severe symptoms, especially central nervous symptoms, and can also cause significant changes to the body’s environment, making the patient’s prognosis after treatment very poor. The treatment of brain metastases from breast cancer is limited by the blood-brain barrier, and many drugs cannot cross the blood-brain barrier to reach the site where the brain metastases are located, so treatment is somewhat limited.
Patients with brain metastases from breast cancer can be treated with cranial surgery, whole-brain radiation therapy, targeted therapy, and other treatments, or with small molecules that can cross the blood-brain barrier, which can also extend their survival time. The most important thing is that once the brain metastasis of breast cancer occurs, the patient’s survival cycle is very short.