Metastatic breast cancer remains a serious disease that can appear even after remission in localized breast cancer. However, developments in treatment and care allow it to be considered today as a chronic disease.
- Metastatic breast cancer can appear immediately or after remission of localized breast cancer
- The most affected organs can be the bones, liver, lung or brain
- Developments in treatment and care allow, despite its seriousness, to consider it as a chronic disease.
“You have to get used to the idea of living with it!” Mahasti Saghatchian, a breast cancer specialist in Villejuif, does not hide the consequences of metastatic breast cancer on her patients. Yet she refuses to see it as anything other than a chronic illness. “We now have treatments that are less and less toxic and which are more and more targeted, and therefore more and more effective”she specifies, daring to compare it with a pathology such as diabetes, for which there is no cure, which must be constantly monitored and treated, but with which one can lead an almost normal personal and professional life.
It is true that while no treatment has yet led to a cure in metastatic breast cancer, it is in the quality of life of patients that the most significant progress has been made in recent years. So much so that some of them can live more than 20 years with such cancer and, as Mahasti Saghatchian points out, “die of something other than breast cancer.”
Better disease control
For a long time, however, this type of breast cancer was accompanied by an unfavorable prognosis. On the one hand, screening campaigns have made it possible to treat many breast cancers earlier, before they degenerate into metastatic cancer. On the other hand, treatments such as supportive care have enabled better control of the disease.
A disease which can appear in two ways: either after localized breast cancer and sometimes treated until remission but which recur a few years later in this metastatic form, that is to say that the tumor which was in the breast has migrated to other organs through which it reappears, either upon diagnosis because it was too late or because the tumor is very aggressive. This is called “right away” metastatic cancer. In both cases, the organs of predilection of the tumor are the bones, the lungs, the liver or the brain. These metastases should be treated not as cancer of the organ in which they developed, but as an extension of breast cancer.
Long-term treatments
Treatments that patients must agree to follow over time. “It is necessary to treat this disease without ever stopping, otherwise it continues to evolve”explains Mahasti Saghatchian, who speaks of “long-term journey” to qualify the management of this metastatic cancer. An approach that involves the oncologist, but also the attending physician… and the family. “In these situations, it is very important to involve the family, it is a complex disease, in which the treatments may have to change, which requires physical but also cosmetic care, it is important that everyone understands all issues”underlines the oncologist.
Below, the program Questions aux Experts with Dr. Mahasti Saghatchian:
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