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For Immediate Release
October 12, 2006
Mercy Provides New Treatment Option for Breast Cancer Patients
Oklahoma City — For 38-year-old Bridget Mullins, a
simple sterling silver bracelet with ribbons etched on the beads and the
word “faith” is a constant reminder as she reaches for a cup in the
cupboard, stirs a dish on the stove or touches the hands of her two
small children that life is indeed precious.
You can do everything right. She did. A recovery
nurse, Mullins has diligently performed breast self-exams every month
since she was 20. She had a baseline mammogram at 36. She had no family
history of breast cancer. And yet, this past May when her youngest was
just 8 months old, she went in for a routine mammogram to find she had
breast cancer. Within two to three weeks, she underwent a biopsy, breast
surgery and radiation.
“I wasn’t worried about dying,” Mullins said. “I was
afraid my kids weren’t ever going to know me. My sister-in-law made me
this bracelet and it’s a daily reminder of how lucky I am to be alive.”
This past month, she celebrated Liam’s first
birthday, and this month, she celebrates life along with thousands of
other breast cancer survivors.
Thanks to a new treatment option—MammoSite Radiation
Therapy System—Mullins and other women who meet certain criteria can
forego a mastectomy—sparing their breasts—and undergo five days of
radiation versus six weeks.
“It meant that my recovery time would be much
quicker and they’d only be irradiating the area where the breast cancer
was,” said Mullins. “But if my margins (the area around) my cancer or
the lymph nodes hadn’t been clear of cancer, I would have opted for a
bilateral mastectomy.”
With MammoSite, a balloon catheter delivers
radiation to the tissue surrounding the area where the cancer tumor was
formerly located, minimizing radiation exposure to the rest of the
breast, skin, ribs, lungs and heart.
“Numerous studies have shown that with early-stage
breast cancer, lumpectomy and whole breast radiation is equal to
mastectomy when it comes to survival,” said Alan Hollingsworth, M.D.,
medical director of both Mercy Women’s Center and Mercy’s Cancer
Program. “We now have 20-year follow-up data that confirms this. The
idea of ‘brachytherapy,’ or targeted radiation to the lumpectomy site
alone, is the next logical extension in breast conservation therapy.”
Mullins’ tumor was five millimeters—too small to be
felt.
“I’m going to be 40 in two years and if I’d waited
until then to have a mammogram, it would have been too late because I
would have had invasive cancer,” Mullins said.
After undergoing surgery, Mullins went in on a
Monday for the MammoSite radiation, finished on a Friday and was back to
work the following Monday.
“For many women, a daily regimen of radiation
treatment for almost two months is too much of an obstacle,” said Kiran
Prabhu, M.D., a Mercy radiation oncologist who is very glad to offer
breast cancer patients another treatment option. “It’s physically and
emotionally draining and sometimes logistically not even feasible if
they live outside the area. Sometimes women just don’t do radiation
treatment because of the logistics, and the tragedy is that they are
three times more likely to have a recurrence of breast cancer.”
With MammoSite, a radioactive “seed” is inserted
within an inflated balloon, targeting radiation to the area directly
surrounding the original tumor, where recurrence is most likely.
“We have known for a long time that, for the
majority of breast cancer patients, the problem is at the lumpectomy
site whereas the breast tissue farther away is cancer-free,” said
Hollingsworth. “Today, with breast MRI, we can be more confident in
determining pre-operatively which patients have only a single area that
needs targeted radiation. Proper patient selection is a key concept
here. Brachytherapy has been studied for the past two decades, but the
early procedures were cumbersome and not very appealing from a cosmetic
standpoint. MammoSite allows delivery of the radiation through a single
catheter and the cosmetic outcome is excellent in the majority of
cases.”
While the MammoSite treatment is generally performed
only on patients over 45, Mullins’ breast MRI showed that the size and
location of her tumor would make her a candidate for the procedure. For
more information about MammoSite at Mercy, call 752-3381.
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