Contents:
- Medical Video: Planning a Metastatic Breast Cancer Retreat | Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center
- Overview of prognosis
- Prognosis for stage 4 breast cancer patients
- Survival rate for stage 4 breast cancer patients
Medical Video: Planning a Metastatic Breast Cancer Retreat | Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center
Stage 4 breast cancer patients are indeed considered incurable. However, treatment must still be carried out to improve the quality of life of patients. Usually, breast cancer patients will be given a prognosis by a doctor. What is the prognosis? Consider the following review.
Overview of prognosis
Prognosis is the possibility of patients recovering from breast cancer. Many treatments can help breast cancer patients live longer and even get better. Even so, breast cancer can also return or spread to other body parts after treatment.
The prognosis can be done by a doctor by considering many factors, such as:
- Size of breast cancer
- Stage of breast cancer; whether the cancer is only in the breast or has spread to lymph nodes or other places in the body.
- Type of breast cancer
- Cancer receptor hormone stastus
- HER2 status
- How likely is the cancer to recur
- Cell growth rate
- Age
- Menopause status
- Cancer is triple negative (negative estrogen receptors, negative receptor progesterone and negative HER2)
- General health
Prognosis for stage 4 breast cancer patients
Stage 4 breast cancer is the most serious stage because most cancer cells have metastatic alias spread to other body parts, such as bones, lungs, liver, lymph nodes, skin, or even your brain.
Reporting from Healthline, the National Breast Cancer Foundation, explains that the symptoms of stage 4 cancer depend on the extent to which cancer cells have spread in the body. Even though the cancer has metastatic and cannot be cured, the patient still has to take medication. By receiving appropriate care can certainly improve the quality of life of patients, such as chemotherapy, radiation, or immune therapy.
Doctors also generally recommend palliative treatment, which is a treatment that prioritizes the comfort of patients even though they have chronic diseases such as cancer. The procedure is to make sure the patient gets painkillers, provides nutritional counseling, trains relaxation techniques such as deep breathing, and so on. In essence, this treatment aims to make the patient's quality of life better.
To determine the prognosis in stage 4 breast cancer patients, doctors will usually see age, health and hormone receptors with cancer cells (the immune system), the type of tissue that is affected by cancer, the patient's attitudes and views of the disease. Not only depends on disease, but also on the spirit of the patient in motivating themselves to recover.
According to the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC), there are a number of general facts that can help determine the prognosis, such as:
- Breast cancer causes the most deaths in women after lung cancer
- Breast cancer patients in higher economic groups have a higher survival rate compared to low economic groups.
- Many women with breast cancer still live longer than predicted. Over the past 10 years, the number of deaths from breast cancer has dropped dramatically.
Survival rate for stage 4 breast cancer patients
The survival of breast cancer patients cannot be predicted correctly. However, experts still do many ways to improve patient survival. According to the American Cancer Society (ACS), breast cancer patients have a 22 percent chance of staying alive for five years after an advanced stage diagnosis. This percentage is much lower than early stage breast cancer.
In stage 3 breast cancer, the relative five-year survival rate is 72%, while in stage 2 is 90%. Because the survival rate of stage 4 cancer patients is lower than others, early treatment is very important.
