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How Is Metastatic Breast Cancer Treated?

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.

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Transcript

00:00
So drugs, especially for breast cancer, they are evolving so rapidly that we're really
00:07
able to offer things now that we couldn't, you know, even 10 years ago. [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:19
Typically, someone with metastatic disease is on some type of treatment. Each particular cancer is different.
00:27
And we know that there are certain subtypes of breast cancer in particular where we know that we have treatments that can prolong life
00:36
for quite a long time. And when we see patients that live in those subsections of disease, we're
00:43
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.
00:56
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.
01:03
And they're always fractionated out over a period of anywhere from one day, a single fraction,
01:10
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.
01:17
Then we have internal radiation, where we actually can put radiation implanted into a specific organ
01:26
or part of the body, where we deliver a dose right to that area. When we use implanted radiation or brachytherapy,
01:33
that radiation is very targeted, only to that area where we put the radiation source.

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