Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Your breast cancer diagnosis will determine your treatment options.

Your breast cancer diagnosis might lead you to many questions. How did this happen to me? What do I do next? What harm will come to me? Having breast cancer can be a confusing time for many women (and men, too).

Doctors have many ways to tell if you have breast cancer and treatment is often given promptly. The first time you may know you have breast cancer may be when you have a mammogram. A mammogram is a special type of x-ray that can show cancer as a cluster of calcium deposits or as a white blotch on the x-ray film. Sometimes the doctor can feel a lump in the breast without a mammogram and sometimes she cannot.

Some women then have a breast ultrasound. This uses sound waves to see if the lump seen on mammogram is solid or if it is filled with liquid. Liquid-filled cavities are called breast cysts and are usually not cancerous. An ultrasound is sometimes used to locate a breast lump for a doctor preparing to do a needle biopsy of the breast.
A newer test to diagnose breast cancer stages is called an MRI or magnetic resonance imaging. This is a test that can look in the breast and other body areas for cancer spots showing up in these areas. The MRI is a good test for women with very dense breasts. A dye is injected into the body at the time of the MRI.
You find out what kind of breast cancer diagnosis you have when you have a breast biopsy. The doctor uses a fine hollow needle to discover what kinds of cells are in the breast lump. Sometimes the doctor uses an open biopsy, which requires stitches and takes a larger sample of the breast lump. Doctors use a microscope to find out what kind of breast cancer diagnosis you have.

Your breast cancer diagnosis will determine your treatment options.

Doctors determine the breast cancer stages in order to know what the best treatment should be. The stage tells the doctor how far the cancer has spread. If the cancer has spread to other body areas, it is called stage IV (metastatic) cancer. If the cancer has not spread outside of the local area, it is called stage 0 (in situ) cancer.

Some of the tests doctors use to tell the stage of the cancer are a mammogram of the other breast, a breast MRI, a chest x-ray, blood tests, CT scans of the body, PET scans of the body or bone scans. Bone scans tell if cancer has spread to the bone. Your doctor will tell you what kinds of tests you need.

What you need to know about your diagnosis, and what to do next

A breast cancer diagnosis can be frightening and it is important to know what to do about breast cancer and treatment of your condition A breast cancer diagnosis can be frightening and it is important to know what to do about breast cancer and treatment of your condition. The biopsy is a way of finding out what kind of breast cancer you have and whether or not the cancer is sensitive to progesterone and estrogen. Progesterone and estrogen are female hormones that are found normally in every woman. Some breast cancers can feed off of the hormones.

Doctors use anti-estrogen and sometimes anti-progesterone medicines to treat breast cancers that are sensitive to these hormones. If you use these medications, the tumor grows more slowly or not at all.

Other tests used in breast cancer diagnosis are the HER1 and HER2 receptor tests. These are receptors found on some breast cancer cells that can be blocked by medicines. This can stop the cancer from growing if you take the medicines.

When doctors use tests to define the type of cancer you have, they should be able to tell you several things. They should tell you the size of the cancer, the grade of the tumor cells in the cancer, the hormone receptor status of the tumor, the HER2 receptor status and how wide the margins were around the cancer that was removed.

They should also be able to tell you if you have positive lymph nodes, how many lymph nodes are involved and if any cancer has been found in any other body areas.