Oct 09
4
Milk Duct Pre Cancer Diagnosis
I had never known that there could be a sort of “pre cancerous” diagnosis of the breast (the milk ducts in particular that supply milk to infants when a mother is breastfeeding), kind of like the diagnosis of precancerous cells in the cervix which are usually due to HPV, which it is thought currently can lead to full blown cervical cancer if left untreated. Apparently, you can be diagnosed with this fairly common carcinoma, which is a type of abnormal cell growth (cancer) that grows within the milk ducts of the breasts, but typically does not invade the body like invasive breast cancer does.
For this reason, this type of carcinoma is not as deadly, in fact only about 2% of women die from it over the next ten years of their lives after being diagnosed, however, it is still important to get it treated either via some sort of radiation or even chemo, or a surgery, so that it does not become invasive. It is thought but not completely proven that if it is left untreated, much like HPV cells on the cervix, it could indeed become cancerous and invasive and require much more serious treatment and become a much more serious diagnosis.
Doctors want to be able to call this precancerous stage something other than the current term “carcinoma” because they feel that some of the other names for it that are floating around, such as precancer or stage 0 breast cancer are less scary and more patient friendly. They feel that these names, rather than carcinoma, which is obviously always mentally associated with serious cancers, more adequately addresses what it is while conveying to the patient that it is not very serious of life threatening, and yet it does need to be treated effectively to prevent any future problems.
The whole problem with this precancerous growth in the breast’s milk ducts is that doctors do not currently have any way of identifying patients with any sort of certainty who are truly a high risk for having the cancer come back as a full blown invasive breast cancer. Sure, they should treat it anyways, but it would be nice to be able to accurately identify the patients who are at higher risk to determine what type of treatment to pursue, and identify their risk factors to communicate this to the patient. Some women even have the breast removed to prevent a possibility of invasive breast cancer in the future, and if that sort of traumatic experience isn’t necessary, then why put the patient through all of that?
