Pink party salutes cancer victims, survivors
11/1/2017
This article was written by Megan Sprague and originally appeared in The Mooresville Tribune on Wednesday, November 1, 2017 on Page 5A
Bill Greear, director of radiology at Lake Norman Regional, introduces speaker Dr. Michelle Bertsch, a breast surgeon, during the Pink Ribbon Tea Party luncheon.
Lake Norman Regional Medical Center’s community rooms were a sea of pink last Friday, as the hospital celebrated current breast cancer patients and survivors at their Pink Ribbon Tea Party luncheon.
The hour and a half event was filled with women who dressed in their best pink finery, and hosted guest speakers Michelle Bertsch, M.D., FACS, Breast Surgeon, and radiologist Heather Kaneda, D.O., who both gave facts and figures about breast cancer and how women can be screened for it.
“We want to keep women as healthy as possible, so they can be stay around to be moms and grandmothers,” said Kaneda. “Our biggest tool to do that is getting a mammogram. It’s important to get screened on a yearly basis.”
One in eight women will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer at some point in their life, with 252,000 new cases expected to be diagnosed in 2017, Kaneda said.
“Aside from skin cancer, breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among American women,” she said. “The greatest risk for breast cancer is being a female, and growing older.”
Kaneda said that 40,610 women will likely pass away this year from the disease, but added that the earlier it’s caught, the more options that are available to treat it.
“Screening mammography reduces the mortality rate of breast cancer by 30 percent or more,” she said.
Screening should begin at 40, said Kaneda, as “women ages 40-49 make up 18.8 percent of all screening detected breast cancers, and the incidences of breast cancer increase substantially around age 40.”
“If we didn’t screen women ages 40-49, we would delay their diagnosis, increasing the risk of diagnosing at a later stage, and thus a poorer diagnosis,” she said. “Sixty percent of cancers diagnosed in this age group are invasive, and 86 percent are intermediate to high grade.”
Kaneda also discussed the importance of 3-D mammography, which decreases false positives and increases invasive cancer detection.
“It’s the best tool for the evaluation of architectural distortion,” she said, describing the distortion as appearing in the scan as a star shape in the breast, which “yields the highest proportion of cancer diagnosis.”
The 3-D mammography machine moves in an arc across the breast, said Kaneda, developing projection images that are reconstructed into one millimeter slices, making it one of the best detection tools regardless of the patient’s breast density.
Bertsch took the podium next, and told attendees the good news that the survival rate for breast cancer is “steadily improving,” and it’s “likely because of early detection and the multimodality of treatment.”
“From the 50s to the 70s, pretty much the only treatment available was a radical mastectomy,” said Bertsch. “Now, we can target our cancer treatment, and include chemotherapy, radiation, and endocrine therapy. There’s been a lot of progress, even with mastectomies, and how much of the breast we can save for reconstruction after removing the tumor.”
Bertsch recommended not only regular mammograms, but having a yearly breast exam by your primary care physician.
“You may have to ask for it, but now that women don’t have to go to the gynecologist every year if their pap smears are normal, it’s better to be cautious,” she said. “You can also examine yourself, looking for lumps in your breast or armpit; any changes to your skin, such as thickening or redness; and any changes in your nipple, like spontaneous discharge or a new asymmetric inversion.”
She recommended paying attention to what your breast normally looks and feels like, as most women detect abnormalities getting in or out of the shower and while getting dressed.
“We want to improve the rate of survival, and the best way to do that is early detection, and getting screened,” Bertsch said.
For more information, Bertsch recommended visiting cancer.org or breast360.org.
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