Breast cancer is an insidious disease that affects not only the woman diagnosed, but the whole family.  Breast cancer accounts for almost 23% of all cancers on a global basis but the survival rate has gone through a dramatic shift and now is around 85%, although it does depend on which type of breast cancer it is.  People often make the mistake of thinking that breast cancer only occurs in women.  That is a falsehood as men can get breast cancer too, however it is around 100 times more common in women.  It can be a devastating diagnosis for men as they often can feel stigmatized by the disease.  Unfortunately they usually wait longer to get diagnosed, and this leads to a worse prognosis.

There have been a lot of different approaches to dealing with breast cancer over the years with the main treatment having been a breast mastectomy.  These surgeries got progressively more and more radical until at one point the radical mastectomy included removing parts of the collarbone and ribs.  Luckily as there were advances in medicine, these barbaric practices were stopped.  Chemotherapy was the next step in treatment and led to improvements in survival rates and remission.  The most recent scientific breakthrough dealt with genes- both in the detection and prevention of the disease as well as the treatment of it.  Certain genes were identified as being related to breast cancer and women with these markers often decide to have preemptory mastectomies.   There are also gene treatments for women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer, and these treatments are fortunately not toxic like chemotherapy is.

But the latest news to come out on breast cancer is perhaps the most amazing of all.  A study published in the Lancet Oncology reveals that there are breast tumors that actually just disappear on their own.  The study involved 650,000 Swedish women who were screened for breast cancer between the years 1986 to 1990.  The study showed that some tumors found through the screenings just started to shrink and disappear when left alone.  This is the first time that a study actually left tumors alone once they were detected.  Usually any form of tumor found in a breast is immediately removed surgically and sometimes also treated with chemotherapy.  This has been done with a woman’s health in mind to rid her body of the cancer, but it means that very little analysis has been done on the natural progression of a breast tumor.

Clearly more studies are needed, but it does seem to indicate that given a chance that the body can sometimes heal itself.  Some experts are concerned that this study will lead women to forgo mammography and breast exams and fear that this will lead to an increased death rate for women of breast cancer.  It is known that if a cancer is going to metastasize, then the best chance at beating it is early detection and early removal.  Mammography is already a touchy subject within the medical community with some experts feeling that it is a life saving necessary procedure and others thinking it is possibly detrimental.  Those who oppose mammography argue that increased radiation can actually cause cancer and that mammography has too many false positives and false negatives to be a reliable tool.  The verdict is not in yet, but this study does provide an interesting look into how the body can heal itself.