There may be a new technology to detect the spread of breast cancer is women who have breast cancer at various stages of the disease.  It is a new diagnostic tool whose idea is to look for and find circulating tumor cells, which actually can give sort of a reading of the spreading of breast cancer throughout the body. 

This unique tool would be able to spot one cancer cell out of millions of healthy cells.  If a woman tests “positive” for the malignant cancer cells, this means her prognosis is not as good as a woman who has tested “negative” since the negative test means that the woman’s blood is not circulating the cancerous cells, and therefore it is staying localized to one area rather than spreading.

This test could not just improve the treatment of the cancer by telling oncologists whether their treatment is successful, but it can also almost immediately tell them whether the treatment is working, and can also tell them to more agressively treat the breast cancer if it is not killing off the cancerous cells, since the spread of these cells is what most often kills women with breast cancer.

An example of how this could work is a woman who is not responding well to chemotherapy or radiation can be switched to another treatment instead, and can react instantly to that other treatment, therefore saving time and saving lives. 

This is an exciting new development, and I can’t help but notice there are quite a few simultaneous developments in the field of breast cancer research.  Hopefully one day the word “cancer” will not be as scary of a diagnosis as it is today….

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Posted in Breast Cancer Prevention Breasts in the News by Breast News Girl No Comments Yet