Mastectomy Needless for Early Cancer
Many Women Not Told That Breast-Conserving Surgery Is an Option
Oct. 16, 2002 -- Two landmark studies confirm what a small group of maverick surgeons proposed nearly 40 years ago: Women need not lose a breast to survive early-stage breast cancer.
After 20 years of research, the studies -- published in the Oct. 17 issue of TheNew England Journal of Medicine -- show that removing just the tumor offers women an equal chance of survival compared with removing the entire breast and many surrounding tissues.
"It's a footprint in history," says Bernard Fisher, MD, director of the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project. "The studies [unequivocally] show that more is not better, that the mutilation surgery performed in the past can be put at rest, that it is now part of medical history," he tells WebMD. Fisher is the lead researcher of one of the NEJM studies.
Developed in 1902, the radical mastectomy was the treatment of choice for breast cancer for more than 80 years. It involved "removing a good portion of the torso -- until you could see ribs, all the way up into the armpit," Otis Brawley, MD, associate director of the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, tells WebMD.
In the 1970s, "a few very forward-thinking, smart, and somewhat brave surgeons started advocating and doing studies to show that simple mastectomy (removal of only the breast itself) was equal to a radical mastectomy," says Brawley. "These surgeons were criticized openly back in the 1940s, '50s, '60s -- called malpractitioners -- for even suggesting that this finding might be true. People would not have an open mind toward the possibility."
Today, the most common form of mastectomy -- "modified radical mastectomy" -- involves removal of the breast, the lymph nodes under the arm, the lining over the chest muscles, and occasionally part of the chest wall muscles.
Fisher was one of the maverick surgeons who first suggested that total mastectomy was putting women through needless suffering. So was Umberto Veronesi, MD, researcher with the European Institute of Oncology in Milan, Italy; he is the lead researcher of the second study in the NEJM.