Treatment
Carcinoma in situ is, by definition, a localized phenomenon, with no potential for metastasis unless it progresses into a "true" cancer. Therefore, its removal eliminates the risk of subsequent progression into a life-threatening condition. This concept is in some ways analogous to uprooting a tree - easy when a young sapling, and much more difficult later.
Some forms of CIS (e.g. colon polyps and polypoid tumours of the bladder) can be removed using an endoscope, without conventional surgical resection. Dysplasia of the uterine cervix is removed by excision (cutting it out) or by burning with a laser. Bowen's disease of the skin is removed by excision. Other forms require major surgery, the best known being intraductal carcinoma of the breast (also treated with radiotherapy). One of the most dangerous forms of CIS is the "pneumonic form" of bronchioloalveolar carcinoma of the lung, which can require extensive surgical removal of large parts of the lung. When too large, it often cannot be completely removed, with eventual disease progression and death of the patient.
Read more about this topic: Carcinoma In Situ
Famous quotes containing the word treatment:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst; considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)