Alva Review-Courier -

You’ve seen the advertisements, witnessed the heartache, made aware of the billions of dollars spent on research, but women continue to die from metastatic breast cancer, some 40,000 Americans every year.

It’s frustrating when an early diagnosis results in radical mastectomy and a woman thinks they are cancer free with no way of truly knowing if they are. Many undergo chemotherapy, their doctors suspecting that they may have micrometastases – growths outside the breast that are too small to appear. Patients may get abdominal scans for verification, but few have brain scans if no symptoms exist.

As with any cancer, the goal of researchers is to eradicate the cells before the disease spreads. According to Fred Hutchinson of the Cancer Research Center in Seattle, 25 to 40 percent of early stage breast cancer patients already have cancer cells in their bone marrow that could be aspirated at the time of surgery when the patient is under general anesthesia.

Current research hopes to find the similarities between breast tissue and the microenvironments inside the body that allow the metastasized cells to flourish elsewhere. Research done in the 1990s showed that detecting metastases through scheduled scans instead of waiting for symptoms to appear did not change survival rates.

Imaging has become better since then with MRI, PET and CT scans that may detect the tiniest tumors. Research today is aimed more at prolonging life than curing the disease, but, as George Sledge of Stanford has said, “If some patients are cured, might not we cure more?”