If you have been diagnosed with breast cancer, you may have already received some form of treatment, depending on the location, stage, and behavior of your cancer.
There are many treatment options for breast cancer, including surgery, radiation therapy, hormone therapy, chemotherapy, immune therapy and more. Your oncologist will be able to advise you on the treatments that suit you the best, based on your individual needs.
If you have been treated before, you should know that prior treatments administered can have a huge effect on your future treatment options.
Treatment plans due to side effects
Every treatment has its own safety profile, encompassing potential side effects and their severity. Because cancer treatments are so powerful in that they are meant to destroy cancer cells, these therapies have cumulative toxicity. This means that doctors cannot always administer the same treatment repeatedly due to the cumulative negative effect on your body.
For example, doctors generally want to limit your exposure to radiation, since radiation itself is known to cause cancer. As such, your doctor will need to assess how much radiation you can receive before the risks outweigh the benefits.
Treatment plans based on cancer response
One of the more challenging aspects of cancer treatment is uncertainty regarding how cancer cells will respond to treatment. Sometimes, cancer cells may become resistant to treatment, meaning a treatment that may have worked before may no longer be effective. As such, doctors may need to switch treatment strategies to keep the cancer cells in check.
For example, you may have been prescribed hormone therapy. When you were first administered the therapy, your doctor may have noted that your cancer had shrunk. However, after some time, this may no longer be the case, and your cancer cells may become active again. Following signs of treatment resistance, your doctor may need to switch you to another form of hormone therapy or a different treatment method altogether.
In addition, cancer receptors may change. For example, you may initially be diagnosed with HER2-negative breast cancer, which may later be found to be positive. This is why it is common practice for doctors to take new biopsy samples for analysis if your cancer returns or spreads. The therapeutic options available to you will depend on these results, as well as the therapies that you have already been administered.
Breast cancer treatment can be an unpredictable journey. Cancer cells may adapt and resist treatment, meaning that new treatment strategies may be necessary. It is therefore important that you alert your doctor to any new changes you may notice in your breast or surrounding tissue so that appropriate action can be taken as quickly as possible.
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