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:
“The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts.... The question “Why did you start using narcotics in the first place?” should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
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—C. John Sommerville (20th century)