In the last ten years, the landscape for women diagnosed with breast cancer has improved for the better, with some significant advancements coming through. Better awareness of risk and affordable prevention steps, along with more successful treatments with fewer side effects than conventional medicine, has given women daily resources to defend themselves against the disease. There are many top breast cancer hospitals in India that has advanced equipment to diagnose and treat breast cancer effectively.

HER2-Directed Therapies

HER2-targeted therapies - human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, a protein that stimulates cancer cell growth — have had a substantial effect on the survival of breast cancers. Though not all breast cancers overexpress those that do (approximately one in five) can be treated successfully with drugs that target this protein.

Hormonal therapy

Hormonal therapy used to avoid binding of oestrogen to the oestrogen receptor-positive disease (cancer that is induced to develop by oestrogen) is not specific to breast cancer; tamoxifen, for example, has been available for over 30 years. Nonetheless, the continued development of this kind of care has provided more options for patients. With these changes, he says we can effectively block the synthesis of oestrogen and treat many cancers effectively with [hormonal] therapies without the need for chemotherapy.

Gene expression testing

Tests to determine the gene types expressed by cancer have allowed doctors to customize therapies to the particular needs of a patient. For breast cancer, doctors use two assays — Oncotype DX and MammaPrint — to help assess a patient's risk of recurrence or spread is based on the types of genes the cancer expresses  which is a process known as gene subtyping) and to plan breast cancer treatment to most effectively reduce this risk. In particular, these tests help assess which patients, in addition to hormone therapy, are more likely to benefit from the treatment of chemotherapy.

Less-Intensive Surgery

For women with early-stage breast cancer also tend to be candidates for less extensive surgery to stage the disease. To decide whether and to what degree cancer has spread to a woman's lymph nodes, nodes are removed for assessment. Operational choices include an axillary node dissection in which several nodes can be removed, and a sentinel node biopsy in which only sentinel nodes are removed (those most likely to have spread to the first). Females with no signs of cancer in their sentinel nodes will miss more axillary node dissection as well as the side effects associated with more extensive surgery. Breast cancer removal surgery is done if the cancer is spread too far.

Nanotechnology

It is the science of making use of very tiny objects. There is a great deal of work in cancer detection and treatment in this area. Chemotherapy can specifically attack the cancer cells using nanoparticles, without damaging the tissue around it. That would make the drugs effective and result in less adverse side effects. Several medications are approved for use.  

There is a lot of new breast cancer treatment advancement that is being found every day to treat patients with cancer more efficiently.