Breast cancer screening has value, but it’s only one of several tools clinicians have available to detect and treat breast cancer. In this video, Laura Esserman, MD, director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center, UCSF, discusses screening.
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So I think it's important to know that screening has value, but it's only one of the tools we have, and while it adds to the treatments for breast cancer, to prevent or reduce immortality for breast cancer. For those women with the highest risk disease, it is not going to be what allows us to get to a cure, so it's not sufficient, right, it's just one of the tools.
And just like anything else you need to know, how to use it best, right? So one of the most important things we could do is try and work on individualizing risk assessment. So if you come from a family of people who have multiple cancers at an early age, you may be carrying an inherited predisposition for cancer.
And for certain kinds of these air hazard mutations, let me call them BRCA mutations, either very aggressive screening or even Prophylactic surgery can be incredibly important in saving someone's lives. For others who may have a history of later onset at the disease, maybe prevention or hormone therapies could be it, and people who are at risk, we actually have three drugs now that are FTA approved for breast cancer prevention.
For women who are at risk for developing hormone positive breast cancer, and we hardly use them. Cardiologists have done a much better job with that. We need to get them the ability to do routine risk assessment at the point of care, when you're starting to screen that's one of the pieces to use.
And my whole strategy is let's do risk-free screening. Now people say how do you know it works? How do you know anything works? Right? We do know, and we're already doing it, but let's do that at a more organized way. A lot of people say, well you can never tell what's going on, so you just have to screen everyone.
Well, look, we know that breast cancer is not one disease, in fact it's four or eight different types of diseases. So why then in our screening and prevention do we treat it as if it's one disease? That just doesn't make any sense.
Laura Esserman, MD, MBA, is a surgeon and breast cancer oncology specialist at the UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center. She talks about breast cancer prevention and screening, as well as the latest advances in breast cancer treatment.
