In this video, Tonya Echols Cole, MD, discusses the encouraging medical advances that are enabling patients to live a longer life with a metastatic breast cancer diagnosis.
Transcript
So drugs, especially for breast cancer, they are evolving so rapidly that we're really
able to offer things now that we couldn't, you know, even 10 years ago. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Typically, someone with metastatic disease is on some type of treatment. Each particular cancer is different.
And we know that there are certain subtypes of breast cancer in particular where we know that we have treatments that can prolong life
for quite a long time. And when we see patients that live in those subsections of disease, we're
able to reassure them that there are other treatment options down the line that we can still use if the one that they're using right now fails.
We can treat with what we call external beam radiation. That's where a patient will come in and get a daily treatment, an X-ray treatment.
And they're always fractionated out over a period of anywhere from one day, a single fraction,
to up to eight, nine weeks of radiation, depending on what part of the body we're treating and what the goal of the treatment is.
Then we have internal radiation, where we actually can put radiation implanted into a specific organ
or part of the body, where we deliver a dose right to that area. When we use implanted radiation or brachytherapy,
that radiation is very targeted, only to that area where we put the radiation source.