Treatment
Multimodal therapy including chemotherapy with a combination of several agents, radiation therapy, hormonal therapy where appropriate and in some cases surgery.
Estrogen antagonist or aromatase inhibitors appear to improve outcome for ER positive cancer, similar for Herceptin.
Surgery was only rarely performed because inflammatory breast cancer is considered essentially a systemic cancer, however it may improve outcome and is now being reconsidered. A lumpectomy, when only a portion of the breast is removed, is not an option for IBC patients. A lymph node dissection is also recommended over a sentinel lymph node biopsy. Lymphedema, swelling of the arm and the hand on the side of the body where surgery was performed, may be a complication after a lymph node dissection. Reconstruction of the breast may be an option for healthy women after a mastectomy. However, for patients who smoke or have diabetes, complications are more common.
A number of promising new therapeutic agents exists, such as
- lapatinib - a Her2neu receptor antagonist
- various VEGF receptor antagonists
- tipifarnib - a farnesyltransferase inhibitor
Read more about this topic: Inflammatory Breast Cancer
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—Fran Lebowitz (20th century)
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—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)