Breast Cancer
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Book preview
Breast Cancer - Lizabeth Hardman
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
A Sisterhood of Struggle and Strength
CHAPTER 1
What Is Breast Cancer?
CHAPTER 2
Symptoms and Diagnosis
CHAPTER 3
Treatment of Breast Cancer
CHAPTER 4
Living with Breast Cancer
CHAPTER 5
The Future of Breast Cancer
NOTES
GLOSSARY
ORGANIZATION OF CONTACT
FOR MORE INFORMATION
INDEX
PICTURE CREDITS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CENGAGE Learning © 2010 Gale, Cengage Learning
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyrighted material.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Hardman, Lizabeth.Breast cancer / by Lizabeth Hardman.p. cm. -- (Diseases & disorders)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-4205-0279-4 (hardcover)1. Breast--Cancer. I. Title.RC280.B8H366 2010 616.99'449--dc22
2009053705
Lucent Books 27500
Drake Rd
Farmington Hills MI 48331
ISBN-13: 978-1-4205-0279-4 ISBN-10: 1-4205-0279-4
Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 14 13 12 11 10
Table of Contents
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
A Hidden Cause of FatigueA Sisterhood of Struggle and Strength
CHAPTER 1
What Is Breast Cancer?
CHAPTER 2
Symptoms and Diagnosis
CHAPTER 3
Treatment of Breast Cancer
CHAPTER 4
Living with Breast Cancer
CHAPTER 5
The Future of Breast Cancer
NOTES
GLOSSARY
ORGANIZATION OF CONTACT
FOR MORE INFORMATION
INDEX
PICTURE CREDITS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FOREWORD
The Most Difficult Puzzles Ever Devised
Charles Best, one of the pioneers in the search for a cure for diabetes, once explained what it is about medical research that intrigued him so. It’s not just the gratification of knowing one is helping people,
he confided, although that probably is a more heroic and selfless motivation. Those feelings may enter in, but truly, what I find best is the feeling of going toe to toe with nature, of trying to solve the most difficult puzzles ever devised. The answers are there somewhere, those keys that will solve the puzzle and make the patient well. But how will those keys be found?
Since the dawn of civilization, nothing has so puzzled people—and often frightened them, as well—as the onset of illness in a body or mind that had seemed healthy before. A seizure, the inability of a heart to pump, the sudden deterioration of muscle tone in a small child—being unable to reverse such conditions or even to understand why they occur was unspeakably frustrating to healers. Even before there were names for such conditions, even before they were understood at all, each was a reminder of how complex the human body was, and how vulnerable.
While our grappling with understanding diseases has been frustrating at times, it has also provided some of humankind’s most heroic accomplishments. Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery in 1928, of a mold that could be turned into penicillin has resulted in the saving of untold millions of lives. The isolation of the enzyme insulin has reversed what was once a death sentence for anyone with diabetes. There have been great strides in combating conditions for which there is not yet a cure, too. Medicines can help AIDS patients live longer, diagnostic tools such as mammography and ultrasounds can help doctors find tumors while they are treatable, and laser surgery techniques have made the most intricate, minute operations routine.
This toe-to-toe
competition with diseases and disorders is even more remarkable when seen in a historical continuum. An astonishing amount of progress has been made in a very short time. Just two hundred years ago, the existence of germs as a cause of some diseases was unknown. In fact, it was less than 150 years ago that a British surgeon named Joseph Lister had difficulty persuading his fellow doctors that washing their hands before delivering a baby might increase the chances of a healthy delivery (especially if they had just attended to a diseased patient)!
Each book in Lucent’s Diseases and Disorders series explores a disease or disorder and the knowledge that has been accumulated (or discarded) by doctors through the years. Each book also examines the tools used for pinpointing a diagnosis, as well as the various means that are used to treat or cure a disease. Finally, new ideas are presented—techniques or medicines that may be on the horizon.
Frustration and disappointment are still part of medicine, for not every disease or condition can be cured or prevented. But the limitations of knowledge are being pushed outward constantly; the most difficult puzzles ever devised
are finding challengers every day.
INTRODUCTION
A Sisterhood of Struggle and Strength
Christa was a healthy twenty-nine-year-old when, during a routine physical, the nurse practitioner examining her found a lump in her right breast. Because of her age, the nurse felt it was probably just a cyst, but nevertheless, she encouraged Christa to see a doctor. The doctor took a biopsy—a small piece of the lump—and had it examined under a microscope. When the doctor’s office called her in to get the results a day earlier than she planned, she tried not to worry. I am still confident that it’s nothing,
writes Christa in her blog. That is probably why they called me in early right? I go in to the exam room and wait for Dr. Fuller. He comes in and tells me it’s cancer. I think my brain shuts down. He’s going on and on about the treatments and the surgery that I would need. I’m not really hearing what he is saying; I’m just focusing on not crying. I go out to the main office, thankful that it is empty. He’s trying to schedule a mammogram [an X-ray of the breast] and a blood test. I hear him on the phone saying, ‘she’s only 29, and can you get her in soon?’
¹
Christa’s case was somewhat unusual. Although breast cancer is the second most commonly diagnosed cancer in women in the United States after skin cancers, most breast cancers occur in women over the age of fifty. The National Cancer Institute estimated that by the end of 2009, approximately 192,370 cases of breast cancer would be diagnosed in women in the United States, and that over 40,000 of them would die from it. They also estimated that more than 1,900 men would develop breast cancer, with about 440 deaths.
African American and Hispanic women are less likely to get breast cancer, but their death rates are higher after diagnosis, possibly because of genetic differences in the tumors, barriers to getting effective health care, or getting diagnosed at a later stage of the disease. Women who are of Ashkenazi Jewish descent have a higher risk of breast cancer, because they tend to carry and pass on an important genetic mutation that increases breast cancer risk. Asian and Native American women have a lower incidence and death rate than Caucasian and African American women, although these occurrences have been increasing over the last two decades.
The overall incidence of breast cancer, however, has been declining since 2002, and death rates from the disease have been decreasing since 1990. Thanks to greatly improved understanding of the nature of breast cancer and improved treatment methods, as of 2008, there are about 2.5 million women in the United States who have survived breast cancer.
A Long History
Breast cancer is one of the oldest known forms of cancer in humans. The Edwin Smith Papyrus, an Egyptian text that dates back to about 1600 B.C.,mentions eight cases of tumors, or masses, of the breast and states that there was no treatment for it. It was not until the seventeenth century, when doctors learned of the relationship between cancer and the lymphatic system through which cancer spreads, that treatment methods began to develop. Eighteenth century surgeons in France and Scotland were among the first to treat breast cancer with a mastectomy the surgical removal of the breast along with the chest wall muscle underneath it and the lymph nodes in the axilla, or armpit.