Breaking Down Surgical Advancements for Those With Breast Cancer

CURE recently sat down for an interview with Dr. Kathie-Ann Joseph to discuss surgical advancements that those with breast cancer should be aware of.

Joseph was recently appointed by RWJBarnabas Health and Rutgers Cancer Institute to be the Chief of Breast Surgery and Co-Director of the multidisciplinary breast program at Rutgers Cancer Institute and the Jack and Sheryl Morris Cancer Center, and she will also serve as Associate Chief Surgical Officer for System Integration and Quality, RWJBarnabas Health, as well as Director of Breast Surgical Services for the RWJBarnabas Health Southern Region.

Transcript

For patients with breast cancer, what are the latest surgical advancements they should be aware of?

One of the things that most women are fearful of is losing their breasts. And for some women, you may not have that option, but I think we're doing we're doing mastectomies less and less, and that's because we have something called oncoplastic surgery, where we can preserve the breast, and for many individuals, that means for those who have larger tumors that previously we would have said we can't really preserve the breast, we conserve the breast. If we have to do a mastectomy, we can take more tissue and then reshape the breast, and still, the woman can still have a normal-appearing breast. And so, that's really cool, and that's really helpful for many people to know that we can do what we call tissue arrangement and so we can do a good cancer operation, which is the main focus of the operation, is to remove the tumor but still preserve the breast. So that's called oncoplastic surgery.

And for those who do need a mastectomy, there's still a wide range of options for breast reconstruction. We're doing nipple sparing for those who meet the criteria. And so, we work very closely with our plastic surgeons. That means that we can remove the breast tissue and still maintain the skin envelope, and as well as a nipple. And so for many individuals, you would never know that they had a mastectomy. We can hide the scars. We can do a lot of different tricks so that it looks like a very normal-appearing breast.

I think those are very exciting advances that we've made in the past several years so that we are able to offer people these options. So, it's not the same options that we used to offer individuals in the past.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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