![]() ![]() ![]() “This study shows you don’t have to do it. Women should be greatly reassured by this news, says Giuliano. “Now, after 10 years of follow-up, I think everyone is embracing this advice,” Giuliano says. The new study followed the patients for 10 years and confirmed the original findings. While many doctors embraced the findings of the earlier study, others felt it was too short and had too few patients to draw firm conclusions. “We expected that there would be other positive nodes, and you wouldn’t want to leave those behind,” says Giuliano. Doctors generally took out the axillary nodes as a precaution. “We’ve proven that if the sentinel node is negative (no cancer), 99 percent of the time the cancer has not spread elsewhere in the body.” What if a sentinel node is positive?īut the question of whether surgeons needed to remove axillary nodes beyond the sentinel ones when a sentinel node is positive for cancer, remained unanswered. “The sentinel node is the first lymph node to which cancer will spread, if it spreads,” says Dr. Taking out and examining one to three sentinel nodes - called a sentinel lymph node biopsy - can help physicians assess the spread of cancer. ![]() Research pioneered by Armando Giuliano, MD, director of the 2017 trial and executive vice chair of surgical oncology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, almost two decades ago revealed that breast cancer often first spreads to nearby lymph nodes called the sentinel nodes. The majority of breast cancer patients in the United States are diagnosed with early-stage cancer. The Question of What to Do About Lymph Nodes Has Been a PuzzleĮarly-stage breast cancer is generally defined as disease that has not spread beyond the breast or the axillary lymph nodes. ![]()
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