Breast Cancer

The doctors diagnose the cancer and determine what kind it is by looking at a sample of the tumor under a microscope. This alone does not determine what treatment you can have. Before treatment, your doctors must determine if or how much the breast cancer has spread. This is called staging the cancer.

The outlook for your recovery and your treatment options, which may include surgery, radiation therapy, or chemotherapy, depend upon the stage of the cancer. If breast cancer is found and treated before it has spread to lymph nodes or other organs, the five-year survival rate is extremely high - about 98%. Early diagnosis and treatment is critical for breast cancer.

PET is the most useful noninvasive test that you can have when doctors are staging or re-staging breast cancer because it is more accurate than any other test in finding local or distant disease. Although PET cannot see microscopic disease, it can detect clusters of tumor cells that have taken hold in other tissues or organs in the body.

How PET works:

In cancer, cells begin to grow at a much faster rate, feeding on sugars like glucose. PET works by using a small amount of a radioactive drug called a tracer in combination with a compound such as glucose. Once you are injected with the tracer and glucose, the tracer travels through your body. It emits signals as it travels and eventually collects in the organs targeted for examination. If an area in an organ is cancerous, the signals will be stronger since more glucose will be absorbed in those areas.

In a majority of breast cancer cases, if the cancer has affected the lymph nodes nearby the tumor, they will take up more of the radioactive glucose. Whether or not lymph nodes are involved is a critical factor in deciding what treatment to utilize. In a single whole-body picture, the PET scan can look throughout your whole body to see if there are any clumps of the cancer cells to indicate that the cancer has spread. The PET scan can make the difference in your recovery.

The type of treatment that can be done is based on both the type of cancer cells found as well as the stage of the cancer. Surgery may be recommended to remove the breast tumor, and perhaps your doctor may also recommend chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy as well.

Breast cancer can spread to nearly anywhere in the body, but most commonly it spreads to the brain, bone, and liver. After first showing the doctors where the cancer cells are, PET can also see if the chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy has been effective at killing them.

Call the PET centers nearest you if you have breast cancer and would like to discuss whether PET could be useful in your care.