Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is cancer that forms in the cells of the breasts.

After skin cancer, breast cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed in women in the United States. Breast cancer can occur in both men and women, but it's far more common in women.

Substantial support for breast cancer awareness and research funding has helped create advances in the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. Breast cancer survival rates have increased, and the number of deaths associated with this disease is steadily declining, largely due to factors such as earlier detection, a new personalized approach to treatment and a better understanding of the disease.

Here is a list of the procedures that we perform with regards to breast cancer:

• Lumpectomy

  • Cancerous (invasive ductal carcinoma, DCIS)

    • Lumpectomy, also called breast-conserving surgery, is a procedure that removes the breast cancer along with a small amount of the healthy tissue surrounding it.

  • Non-cancerous (fibroademona, cyst, infection)

• Mastectomy

  • Cancerous (invasive ductal carcinoma, DCIS)

    • A mastectomy is surgery that removes all of the breast tissue, either to treat breast cancer or to prevent it from developing in people at high risk for the disease. Some lymph nodes from the underarm on the side of the tumor are usually removed as well to see if the cancer has spread beyond the breast.

  • Non-cancerous (risk reduction)

    • Generally this is for patient’s with a strong family history of breast cancer and who are BRCA-1 or BRCA-2 gene positive.

• Sentinel lymph node biopsy

  • During a lumpectomy, the surgeon also usually removes one to three underarm lymph nodes. Removing these lymph nodes is known as a sentinel lymph node biopsy. A doctor called a pathologist examines these lymph nodes to check for any signs of cancer. If the pathologist finds cancer, you may need to have more lymph nodes removed through a procedure called axillary lymph node dissection.