A new study has found that a double mastectomy to treat cancer that only occurs in one breast does not increase the rate of survival for women. This is troubling because more and more women with breast cancer have been opting for a double mastectomy, which is a more involved surgery than just removing the tumor, and may prove to be ultimately ineffective.
This study was published today, Tuesday September 2, 2014, in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study consisted of 200,000 women in California who were being treated for breast cancer in only one breast. The study tracked the women for up to ten years, and found that women who had a single mastectomy had almost the same survival rate at ten years as women who had a double mastectomy. Both groups had about an 82 percent survival rate ten years after the mastectomies.
Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, who works at the American Cancer Society, said that a large number of doctors already thought that a double mastectomy to treat breast cancer occurring in only one breast did not significantly help in treating breast cancer.
"There's no guarantee that by having the second breast removed that you will do better," Lichtenfeld said.
Roughly half of the women in the study had a lumpectomy, but the data suggested an upward trend in women who opted for a double mastectomy. From 1998 to 2011, there was a 12 percent increase in women who chose to have double mastectomies. The jump was highest in women under 40. Before 1998, only 4 percent of women under 40 chose to have double mastectomies; by 2011, 33 percent did.
Doctors have suggested double mastectomies for women who have a rare gene that highly increases your risk for developing breast cancer. Angelina Jolie famously chose to have a double mastectomy last year in 2013, because she learned that she had the gene, BRCA1.
However, this new study suggests that women without this gene do not face better odds of survival if they have double mastectomies and only have cancer in one breast. The researchers who authored this study warned against opting for an extremely expensive and risky procedure that had "dubious effectiveness."
An editorial about the study which was also published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, written by Dr. Lisa Newman, urged surgeons to consider against double mastectomies for women who don't have the BRCA1 gene and only have cancer in one breast.
