Understanding Breast Cancer Recurrence

Your health care team will make every effort to remove all traces of a breast tumor during surgery. Many patients may never have a recurrence, but breast cancer may still recur in some patients. A recurrence can happen months or years after the original diagnosis and treatment. For example, even though a breast cancer tumor may appear small and localized, it may be aggressive and may have spread beyond the breast; this spread cannot always be detected by current methods. This aggressiveness, as well as other factors, can lead to breast cancer recurrence.

To reduce the likelihood of recurrence, patients are typically treated with hormonal therapy or chemotherapy, which effectively reduce recurrence risk in many, but not all, patients. However, these therapies also have short-term and long-term side effects. For this reason, doctors and patients must consider the risks and benefits of each potential treatment plan to determine which option is best for the patient.

What Does Recurrence Mean?

Recurrence is the return of cancer after initial treatment. There are two types of recurrence:

Local recurrence is the return of cancer to the area where a patient originally had surgery. Signs of local recurrence are usually discovered during mammograms, physical examinations or patient self-examinations.

In distant recurrence, cancer metastasizes, or spreads to other parts of the body. Doctors usually identify distant recurrence after patients report symptoms such as bone pain, weight loss or shortness of breath. They order a series of tests to determine whether the cancer has returned and which areas are affected. If cancer metastasizes, it commonly spreads to the lungs, bones, liver and brain.

Local recurrence is often treated as the original cancer was: with surgery, followed by radiation therapy, chemotherapy or hormonal therapy. Metastatic breast cancer can be treated, but unfortunately it cannot be eradicated. However, women with metastatic cancer can live for many years, with treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

Email This Page:

Your Name:
Your Email:
To Email(s):	Enter up to 5 email addresses, separated by commas
Comments:
	or Cancel