Medical Madness: More Women Scared Into Double Mastectomy as Way to "Prevent" Cancer

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(NaturalNews) Increasing numbers of women are choosing to have both breasts removed in order to avoid breast cancer -- but doctors warn that many of these procedures may expose women to serious risk without providing the promised benefit.

In general, two kinds of women use double mastectomy as a preemptive breast cancer treatment. One group consists of women who have been diagnosed with cancer in one breast and choose to have both breasts completely removed in order to avoid the risk of developing cancer in the healthy breast. This procedure is called contralateral prophylactic mastectomy. Another group, the so-called "pre-vivors," are women who have not received a cancer diagnosis at all but believe they have a high enough cancer risk to justify the measure.

Performing mastectomies as prophylaxis was uncommon just a few decades ago, but the popularity of the practice has risen sharply in recent years.

"For the past 20 years we have moved toward less invasive surgery with lumpectomy and radiation instead of total mastectomy," said surgeon Walter "Bo" Blessing of Surgical Associates in Charleston, S.C. "However, in the last three to five years, with the advent of new reconstructive techniques and breast MRI, more women are choosing mastectomy."

Most insurers will pay for either single or double mastectomy, even without a cancer diagnosis in both breasts.

According to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Minnesota and published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology< in 2007, contralateral prophylactic mastectomy rates in the United States increased 150 percent between 1998 and 2003. The Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, Tenn., reports a fivefold increase in the practice in recent years.

Statistics from the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database reveal that it is mostly younger women choosing prophylactic mastectomies. As new diagnostic techniques continue to detect cancers earlier, the rates of preventive mastectomy are only inspected to grow.

"Women today are more educated about their risk factors, and we understand genetics better," said Valerie Gorman, a breast surgeon at Baylor Medical Center in Waxahachie, Texas, who reports increasing numbers of women coming to her for preventive mastectomies. "Plus, genetic testing is easier than in the past, and plastic surgery reconstructive procedures are more accessible."

The genetic tests that Gorman references screen mostly for mutations in the tumor-suppressing BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes; having a mutation in either gene can increase a woman's breast cancer risk by 80 percent. In other words, an otherwise healthy woman with such a mutation would have a breast cancer risk of 22 percent, rather than the average of 12.5 percent. Bilateral mastectomy can cut this risk by about 90 percent -- bringing it, in the case of the "average" woman cited above, to about 2 percent.

In the case of "pre-vivors," the presence of these mutations alone may be enough to convince some women to choose double mastectomy. Women with a cancer diagnosis in one breast may also choose mastectomy if they have genetic or other risk factors, or if they are concerned about the elevated risk that comes from already having had cancer once.
"Most of my patients that proceed with bilateral mastectomy tell me that they did not want to have to worry about further monitoring of the opposite breast," said surgeon Gretchen A. Meyer.

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