Scott Allen, "Risks seen in breast cancer surgery", Boston Globe,
September 13, 2005,
Link:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/09/13/risks_seen_in_breast_cance
r_surgery/

Some women in their 40s who undergo surgery to treat breast cancer may
actually increase their risk of a near-term relapse, according to a
controversial Harvard Medical School study that suggests cancer surgery
itself may ''awaken" dormant tumor cells in other parts of the body.

The Harvard researchers found that, for about 20 percent of women in
their 40s whose breast cancer has spread to their lymph nodes, cancer
surgery seems to cause tiny tumors in other parts of their body to
grow. Roughly 1 in 10,000 of these women would die early as a result.
But the heightened risk of relapse was not seen in women 50 and older,
and it seems to largely disappear for younger women after 18 months.

The researchers believe that their study, based on a computer analysis
of past cancer cases rather than laboratory work, could mark the
beginning of a new way of understanding why cancer spreads.

''Our results suggest most young women benefit from early detection of
breast cancer, but a small percentage will relapse and die early of
metastatic disease," said Dr. Michael Retsky, lead author of the study.

He said there may be treatments to make surgery safer for the minority
of women who are at highest risk of relapse, but ''young women need to
be advised of the risk of accelerated tumor growth and early relapse
before giving informed consent for mammography" since surgical removal
is a common treatment for tumors detected by the mammogram.

The study, published in today's International Journal of Surgery, is
likely to fuel the already heated debate over the life-saving value of
early detection of breast cancer. Yesterday, advocates of mammograms
for women as young as 40 called the study seriously flawed, and said it
threatens to undermine a 25 percent drop in breast cancer death rates
over the last 15 years.

''If we discourage women from getting breast cancer screening,
significant gains that we have made will go down the tubes," said Dr.
Daniel Kopans, a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who has
been a leading advocate for early breast cancer screening.

Dr. Patrick Borgen, chief of the breast service in the surgery
department of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said
the study is mostly ''theory and hypothesis" that could scare people
from getting mammograms out of fear that the treatment will kill them.

Retsky, who works in the laboratory of cancer research pioneer Dr.
Judah Folkman at Children's Hospital Boston, based his findings on the
long-term fate of 1,173 breast cancer patients who underwent surgery in
Italy before 1980 when most patients started receiving chemotherapy
after surgery to reduce the risk of cancer relapse. As a result, the
researchers could focus on how the body responds to surgery alone.
However, they argue their findings apply also to women who get
chemotherapy, noting that recent studies show that women in their 40s
don't get as much life-saving benefit from breast cancer treatment as
older women.

The researchers found that more than one-quarter of premenopausal women
whose lymph nodes tested positive for cancer suffered a relapse of
cancer in the first 10 months after surgery. By comparison, women older
than 50 whose lymph nodes tested positive for cancer had a relapse rate
of only 12 to 18 percent. The Harvard team, working with researchers
from the Italian National Cancer Institute, concluded that the younger
women whose cancers had already spread were at greater risk because
removal of the breast cancer triggers chemical changes in their bodies
that signal cancer cells elsewhere to form blood vessels so that they
can grow.

Retsky said the theory helps to explain what he calls the ''mammography
paradox" in which women in their 40s don't benefit as much from cancer
detection as older women.