What is Early Breast Cancer?

Abstract

It is most unfortunate that many still view the progression of cancer in general, and breast cancer in particular, from what now appears to be an anachronistic perspective. This so-called conventional view assumes that cancer grows with time and subsequently spreads to regional lymph nodes, and that after another time interval spread from these structures occurs, resulting in disseminated disease. Because of this algorithm a concept of early cancer has evolved, for it can be readily, and one might add quite simplistically, recognized that interruption of this cycle prior to spread to regional lymph nodes or dissemination from these ought to result in cure. The cancer is regarded as having been removed at an early or favorable stage. According to this, breast cancer is not only exclusively a temporal phenomenon, but a surgical disease whose outcome depends upon the surgeons’ or radiotherapists’ ability to eradicate all of the sources of dissemination. Yet, what is overlooked by proponents of this conventional concept is that despite refinements of surgical and radiotherapeutic technics to eliminate local disease and efforts to diagnose the disease early, the survival rate for breast cancer has not significantly improved over a span of at least five decades. Indeed, therapeutic measures are now being explored in which lesser operative procedures are being performed. This new attitude has not been provoked solely for cosmetic reasons, but has knowingly or unknowingly arisen from studies revealing a new or alternative hypothesis concerning the biology of breast cancers and, one migt add, other cancers as well.