At present, the incidence rate of breast cancer in China has become the first place of malignant tumors in women, and the age of incidence tends to be younger. With the deepening of people’s understanding of breast cancer, the early detection rate of breast cancer patients has increased significantly, and with the improvement of treatment methods, its treatment effect has been greatly improved. Currently, the overall survival rate of early-stage breast cancer patients reaches over 90% in 5 years and nearly 80% in 10 years.
Hyperplasia
Will hyperplasia turn into breast cancer?
Many patients who come to the hospital have this question, and 70% of them come to the hospital when they have symptoms of breast enlargement.
Mammary gland hyperplasia is a common disease among women of childbearing age and it is a benign disease with very low chance of cancer. However, at the same time, it is important to pay attention to it because there are individual atypical hyperplasia and cancer that can be easily confused. Clinically, it often happens that it has been diagnosed as hyperplasia in non-specialized hospitals, but it is cancer after examination in specialized hospitals. It is likely that this is not a cancerous hyperplasia, but a misdiagnosis due to atypical clinical manifestations. Some data show that the percentage of patients with atypical breast cancer being misdiagnosed as hyperplasia is about 12%-16%. For breast hyperplasia, first of all, we should understand it correctly and not worry too much, regular clinical examination is enough.
Heredity
Does breast cancer run in families?
What is the risk of sisters and daughters of breast cancer to develop cancer? These questions are often asked in outpatient clinics.
Two concepts need to be emphasized here: familial breast cancer and hereditary breast cancer. For women who are at high risk of hereditary breast cancer, they can choose to undergo “hereditary breast cancer risk prediction” if they have the conditions to detect and treat the disease early.
Men
Since men have breast glands like women, breast cancer is not exclusive to women, but also to men. Breast cancer in men is a rare disease worldwide, accounting for 1% of all breast cancers, which means that one in every hundred breast cancer patients is a man. So, what are the signs of male breast cancer?
Male breast cancer has unique pathological characteristics: higher age, longer disease duration and poor prognosis. However, if detected early and treated promptly, the treatment prognosis tends to be the same as that of women. The factors that affect the prognosis of male breast cancer are mainly the type of pathology, stage, treatment and the presence of lymph node metastasis at the time of consultation. Most reports suggest that the overall 5-year and 10-year survival rates after treatment for male breast cancer are slightly lower than those for women. Therefore, the key to improving the prognosis of male breast cancer is early detection, early diagnosis and early treatment.
Surgery
What should I do if I am afraid of “one-size-fits-all”?
With the development of breast cancer treatment technology and early diagnosis system in recent years, patients have higher requirements for quality of life after surgery. Breast reconstruction technology has become a new trend in breast cancer treatment because it can meet the needs of breast cancer patients in terms of treatment effect, physical restoration and psychological relief.
Breast reconstruction for breast cancer patients can restore patients’ physical beauty as much as possible while ensuring local control, which can meet patients’ needs for treatment as well as their requirements for physical and psychological shape, effectively solving patients’ inconvenience of having two separate surgeries for breast tumor removal and plastic repair, avoiding the pain and cost of secondary surgery, and further improving patients’ quality of survival.
Second pregnancy
Can breast cancer patients have it?
Experts point out that breast cancer related treatments can have an impact on fertility, such as chemotherapy for breast cancer. Most studies have suggested that fertility does not increase the risk of breast cancer recurrence and metastasis. On the contrary, some studies also suggest that childbirth has the effect of reducing breast cancer mortality.
For post-operative breast cancer patients with low risk of recurrence, they can consult their physicians for fertility preparation after adjuvant chemotherapy is completed for more than 2 years and their condition is stable after review, while patients with endocrine therapy can consult their oncologists and fertility physicians after 2-3 years of endocrine therapy to choose the time to stop endocrine therapy and prepare for fertility.
Metastasis
What should I do if my breast cancer has metastasized?
Breast cancer is a chronic disease among tumors. Despite the occurrence of metastasis, the survival period is still longer compared with other tumors, and local recurrence can still be cured through comprehensive treatment. Bone metastasis alone also has a long survival period through chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery. If the patient has tumor metastasis in internal organs, the efficiency of chemotherapy can also reach more than 70%. Even if tumor metastasis occurs, patients should face it positively, take as few detours as possible and go to an experienced specialized hospital for reasonable treatment.
Prevention
Is self-examination effective?
Many women are willing to spend money on cosmetics and nutritional products, but are not willing to go to hospital for regular breast examination, on the grounds that they can “self-examine” at home and do not need to go to hospital. In fact, self-examination of the breast can only detect larger tumors, but there is often nothing that can be done about lesions that are in a budding state. Therefore, self-examination is only an auxiliary tool.
It is recommended that women over the age of 40, especially those at high risk of breast cancer, have an annual mammogram. Note: Annual checkups are necessary to prevent breast disease.