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
Famous quotes containing the word treatment:
“[17th-century] Puritans were the first modern parents. Like many of us, they looked on their treatment of children as a test of their own self-control. Their goal was not to simply to ensure the child’s duty to the family, but to help him or her make personal, individual commitments. They were the first authors to state that children must obey God rather than parents, in case of a clear conflict.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“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)
“Our treatment of both older people and children reflects the value we place on independence and autonomy. We do our best to make our children independent from birth. We leave them all alone in rooms with the lights out and tell them, “Go to sleep by yourselves.” And the old people we respect most are the ones who will fight for their independence, who would sooner starve to death than ask for help.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)