Beating Breast Cancer in One Day!

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Beating Breast Cancer in One Day!

– Reported, August 27, 2013

 

CLEVELAND, Ohio (Ivanhoe Newswire) — Thirty minutes, that’s how long it takes for two women to die from breast cancer; that’s one woman every fifteen minutes. However, due to new drugs and new treatments, many, many more women will beat this disease. There is a new breakthrough that has women leaving the hospital in one day, surgery, radiation and all!

Joanne Duffy is a part of a survivors group; this group helped Duffy face her breast cancer. However, Joanne’s treatment was different than the other women. She is one of the first to have a lumpectomy and all of her radiation in one surgery.

“If a woman has a lumpectomy for breast cancer, the site where the cancer will most likely come back is the site where it was before,” Doctor Stephen Grobmyer, MD, Surgical Oncologist at The Cleveland Clinic Breast Center, told Ivanhoe.

That’s why immediately following the tumor removal, surgeons at The Cleveland Clinic are using Intra-Operative Radiation Therapy to specifically target the area where the tumor was removed.

“The radiation only travels about a centimeter, so it really has no chance of damaging normal tissue,” Doctor Grobmyer explained.

Traditionally, patients would start monthly chemotherapy infusions for a year after surgery, and then follow that by daily radiation treatments for three to five weeks. The Intra-Operative treatment cuts out all the radiation treatments for many patients. Whether chemo is needed depends on the size and type of tumor.

“It’s allowing us to tailor the treatment specifically to the patient and their type of breast cancer,” Doctor Grobmyer said.

Intra-Operative Therapy wiped out Joanne’s cancer, and now she’s focusing on helping other women.

“I feel like a woman who’s 71, but I feel like I’m 31,” Joanne Duffy, Breast Cancer Survivor, told Ivanhoe.

Because healthy tissue is not damaged, recovery time is quicker. In fact, some patients can go home the same day of surgery and they don’t have to come back!

Since this is still being studied long term, doctors are using it for patients with early stage breast cancer that are age sixty or older.