Active Monitoring May Be a Safe Treatment Option for Many Women with DCIS Breast Cancer, New Study Suggests

Watching and waiting is a safe and viable treatment option for many women with DCIS breast cancer, a new study finds.

Researchers say patients with low-risk ductal carcinoma in situ who underwent active monitoring had similar recurrence rates as women who underwent surgery to remove their cancer.

DCIS involves abnormal cells found within a milk duct. It’s an early, noninvasive form of breast cancer that accounts for about 20% to 25% of all new breast cancer cases in the United States.

Author Shelley Hwang of Duke University says, “All current treatments for DCIS aim to reduce the risk of future invasive cancer, despite a growing body of evidence that not all DCIS is destined to progress.”

673 women with DCIS were randomly assigned to either active monitoring or surgery and followed through on their assigned treatment.

After two years, the breast cancer recurrence rate was 8.7% in those who received hormone therapy and surgery, versus 3.1% for those simply monitored, according to the results.

Hwang says, “This is the first time that we've put active monitoring to a rigorous prospective randomized trial. So, I think from that perspective, it's very novel, exciting. And my hope is that it opens the door to other clinical trials in the future that will develop this further, will identify the patients who are the best patients for this sort of approach and ultimately will reduce the amount of over-treatment that we subject these patients to so that they can have an overall better quality of life and more options in terms of how to reduce their future breast cancer risk.” 

Longer-term follow-up among participants is now underway.

Source: San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium

Author Affiliations: Duke University School of Medicine