December 13, 2020
The risk of becoming dependent on pain medication and sedatives after mastectomy and breast reconstruction surgery is more significant than doctors realized.
A study presented this week at the virtual meeting of the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) found that people who underwent mastectomy and breast reconstruction were at increased risk of developing dependence on pain and sedative medication.
The study showed that 13.1 percent of patients who were not prior opioid users became new persistent opioid users after surgery. Researchers found 6.6 percent of patients who were not prior sedative-hypnotic users became persistent users after surgery.
“It’s striking how many patients this is an issue for. It’s more than maybe we would have thought prior to doing the study,” said the lead author, Jacob Cogan, MD, a fellow in hematology-oncology at NewYork-Presbyterian Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City.
Circulating tumor cell dynamics linked with overall survival in patients with metastatic breast cancer
Early circulating tumor cell dynamics were associated with overall survival in patients with metastatic breast cancer, according to a meta-analysis presented at the 2020 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, held Dec. 8-11.
With the increasing number of treatment options available to patients with metastatic breast cancer, being able to predict and monitor treatment responses rapidly will be critical to aiding treatment decisions.
Wolfgang Janni, MD, PhD, professor, director of the women s clinic, Ulm University Hospital in Ulm, Germany
Responses to breast cancer treatment are typically monitored by conventional imaging, but this method requires time approximately three months, depending on the subtype before changes can be detected, Janni explained. We were interested in determining whether treatment response and prognosis could be predicted earlier using a simple blood test.