San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium Explores DCIS "Battleground"

Extract

Management of diagnoses such as ductal carcinoma in situ is today’s breast cancer battleground, Bernard Fisher, M.D., scientific director of the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project, told an audience at the 22^nd Annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

The need for solutions is great because the widespread adoption of screening mammography in the United States has resulted in a substantial increase in the number of women diagnosed with DCIS. In 1983, nearly 5,000 women were diagnosed with DCIS, according to Virginia Ernster, Ph.D., and her colleagues at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine. In 1997, more than 36,000 new cases of DCIS were diagnosed in the United States — about 15% to 20% of all new breast cancers — according to Sarah Landis and others at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta, Ga.

The real question is, “Should DCIS be treated as cancer — or just by excision and observation?” asked Monica Morrow, M.D., director of the Lynn Sage Comprehensive Breast Program at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University, Chicago. Several studies have helped to fill the previous void in DCIS research and to answer that question, but current treatment protocols continue to lead to the possibility of recurrence in some women or overtreatment in others.