Breast cancer requires surgery, right? Not so fast

When a woman learns she has breast cancer, her reaction is often: take it out. Now doctors say that might not always be necessary. Some women with the earliest stages of breast cancer could be carefully monitored, undergoing surgery and radiation only if the disease advances, new data suggests. The strategy is akin to one already used in early prostate cancer, as doctors are increasingly looking at whether they can pull back on some cancer therapies, to spare patients side effects and costs.

“This is really the first study to confirm our suspicions that there’s a subset of low-risk patients that could do just as well without surgery,” said Dr. Nancy Chan, a breast-cancer specialist at NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center, who wasn’t involved in the study. “It’s really encouraging.”

Some doctors said there wasn’t enough long-term data [proving] the practice is safe. How aggressively to treat this form of early-stage cancer—and whether to call it cancer at all—is controversial.

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