October 02, 2008

Breast Cancer - A General History and Overview

Breast cancer is one of the most common and the most deadly cancer to affect women. Thousands of women will find their lives affected by this disease each year - whether they themselves develop it or someone close to them will have it.

Breast cancer begins in the breast. By this, we refer to an area that goes as high as the collar bone and can reach from tissue under the arm to the center of the chest. The main makeup of the breast is a combination of fatty tissue, milk ducts, glands and lobules. Lobules are glands that produce milk.

The most common types of cancers in the breast are usually found in the lobules or the milk ducts. When a breast cancer is described as being ‘in situ’ it means that the cancer remains contained and has not begun to invade any of the surrounding tissue. Below are some of the more common types of cancer in the lobules or the milk ducts:-

1) Ductal Carcinoma in situ - when the cancer is located in the milk duct lining but it has not spread. This is a very treatable form of the cancer.

2) Lobular Carcinoma in situ - is when the cancer is located in a lobule but has not spread. Some in the medical community consider this to be just an early warning of possible cancer while others feel it is cancer and is highly treatable as well.

3) Invasive Ductal Carcinoma - is cancer that begins in the lining of the duct but has broken free to the surrounding tissue.

4) Invasive Lobular Carcinoma - is the cancer has started in one of the milk producing lobules but has broken through to surrounding tissue.

The rarer forms of breast cancer include the Sarcoma which involve the connective tissue of the breast, Paget’s disease which affect the nipple and the dark tissue surrounding the nipple, or an inflammatory breast cancer which block the lymph vessels near the surface of skin tissue and manifests itself by causing an inflammation. Recurrent breast cancer is cancer that has returned and may have developed in some other tissue or organ of the body.

Cancer is not a new disease. It has been with us since since civilization but we started noticing this disease only around the 17th century. During that era, the medical community began to understand how the body’s circulatory system worked. With that medical discovery, they realized that the cancer in the breast can quickly spread to the rest of the body through the lymph nodes that are located adjacent to the breasts and under the arms.

To halt the spread of this deadly disease, it became the surgical practice to not only remove the affected breast tissue but also the lymph nodes as well. There are many recorded cases of mastectomies being performed in the later part of the 19th century. Going forward into the 20th century, the medical community have developed a number of different options for treatments. Though the techniques are greatly advanced, the basic principle procedure remains to first remove the cancer surgically and then follow it up with an option of treatments that may involve chemotherapy, radiation, and drug therapy. However in some cases the cancer may be treated without the surgery.

It has been noted that the occurrence of breast cancer has greatly increased from the latter part of the 20th century. Extensive research continues into whether this deadly disease is connected to the increasingly toxic environment we live in. There is an urgent need to understand the causes and to prevent this disease from spreading. Learn more about breast cancer now!