Over the past decade, women who’ve received a dreaded diagnosis of breast cancer, have tended to choose mastectomy (removal of the breast)—even in the case of small or early-stage cancers. However, women who combined a lumpectomy (removal of only the tumor) with radiation had significantly higher survival rates than those who opted for the mastectomy.
Duke University researcher E. Shelley Hwang and her colleagues analyzed data from more than 100,000 California women with Stage 1 and Stage II breast cancers. The women had had either a mastectomy or a lumpectomy plus radiation. Those who had the less-invasive treatment—which is also less cosmetically altering—had a 19 percent higher survival rate.
Perhaps even more significant, Hwang found that in the first three years after mastectomy surgery, women who had mastectomies were more likely to die from heart disease and other diseases than those who had the lumpectomy.
Hwang’s findings were published in the journal Cancer.
