Surgery helps if cancer spreads

Surgery appears to greatly increase a patient’s chances of surviving with breast cancer, even if the cancer has spread by the time a woman is diagnosed.

Although many women around the world are simply offered what is known as palliative care, to help them live a little longer and make them comfortable while they wait to die, surgery could help them live much longer, Swiss researchers found.

“Based on these findings, we believe that it is time to take a hard look at the current standard of care for breast cancer patients initially diagnosed with metastatic disease,” said Dr. Elisabetta Rapiti of the Geneva Cancer Registry at the University of Geneva, who led the study.

Rapiti’s team, reporting in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, studied 5,000 patient records from the last 35 years and found that women with metastatic breast cancer at initial diagnosis were 40% less likely to die from the disease if they had the primary tumor surgically removed.