Surgical treatment of breast cancer

Breast cancer is one of the most common malignant tumors in women. In many areas of my country, it has become the number one malignant tumor in women. With the deepening of people's understanding of the biological characteristics of breast cancer, its treatment model has developed from a single local surgical treatment model to a comprehensive systemic treatment model. However, surgical treatment still occupies a dominant position among its various treatment methods.

Surgery alone cannot cure breast cancer, because studies have shown that breast cancer is a systemic disease from the onset, and local treatment only removes the primary lesion and cannot cure the disease itself. Currently, breast cancer is treated with comprehensive treatment, that is, surgery is the main treatment, supplemented by chemotherapy, radiotherapy, endocrine therapy, biological targeted therapy, and immune support and/or traditional Chinese medicine treatment.

Standard breast cancer surgery requires the removal of the affected breast tissue, fat tissue, affected pectoralis major and minor muscles, affected skin and nipple areola, affected axillary lymph nodes and fat tissue. Now it has been improved, and most of them use surgery that preserves the pectoralis major and minor muscles. In addition, in recent years, patients with conditions can use breast-preserving radical breast cancer surgery, which only removes the tumor and some normal glands around it, axillary lymph nodes and fat tissue.

In principle, breast cancer surgery is suitable for patients in the other three stages, as long as the breast cancer is not in stage IV. Of course, the patient must be able to tolerate the surgery and have no uncontrollable complications. Now there is a new view that for patients with advanced breast cancer, chemotherapy can be used first, that is, neoadjuvant chemotherapy, and then surgical resection can be performed after the tumor shrinks.