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This year, about 1.7 million people will hear the words, "You have cancer." In 2016, there were 15.5 million cancer survivors in the US, and that number is expected to rise to 20.3 million by 2026. .
"We continue to discover so many new things every day," says Otis Brawley, M.D., chief medical officer and scientific officer for the American Cancer Society. In just one year, 31 new therapies to treat more than 16 types of cancers have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Related: Cancer Stages: What You Need to Know
One thing that's new: Screening saves lives. "Some estimates say that we can decrease the number of color deaths by 12,000 to 20,000 if screening guidelines were followed," Brawley says.
Here are some of the most exciting advances in cancer happening today.
Personalized Care for Breast Cancer
In the past it was difficult to identify which women with early breast cancer were at risk for recurrence. As a result, many received unnecessary chemotherapy, radiation and hormonal therapy. Now, results from a groundbreaking study, known as TAILORx trial, found that hormone therapy may be more important than 70% of the time. nausea, vomiting and anemia.
Related: Surprising News About Early-Stage Breast Cancer
"This means a large number of patients can safely avoid chemotherapy," says Jame Abraham, MD, director of the Cleveland Clinic's Breast Oncology Program. "We can really individualize treatment and make sure we are prescribing the right treatment for the right purpose."
The Latest Innovative Treatment
Cancer is traditionally treated with one or more therapies: surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. That is until recently, when immunotherapy joined the tool kit. "This treatment is distinct and completely different from the other three," says Timothy Rebbeck, Ph.D., professor at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
Cancer cells grow because they are able to stay hidden from your immune system. Immunotherapy, a type of biological therapy, works by reprogramming a patient's own immune cells to cancer cells throughout the body, and has been heralded as "Advance of the Year" by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). So far, it has had significant results in young patients with multiple forms of leukemia and multiple myeloma (a type of blood cancer) and lymphoma (a type of carcinoma involving cells of the immune system) and is extremely promising for triple-negative treatment. breast cancer, one of the most difficult-to-treat breast cancers.
A Blood Test to Diagnose Cancer
When tumors develop, they release tiny fragments of substances containing mutated DNA and proteins (known as "tumor markers") into the bloodstream. A simple blood test, which has been tested with cancer, can identify tumor markers with eight common types of cancer screening, including breast, lung, colorectal, ovarian, liver , stomach, pancreatic and esophageal cancers.
Related: Most Americans Do not Know Exercise Cancer Risk Decreases
"The test has become so fine that it can be seen coming from," says oncologist Larry Norton, MD, Medical Director of the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. The Johns Hopkins researchers who pioneered this test, called CancerSEEK, hope that this will be a quick and easy way to detect cancer in its early stages, when it is usually more successfully treated.
A Minimally Invasive Way to Remove Lung Cancer
Treatment for early-stage lung cancer usually involves lobectomy, which removes a portion of the lung by the chest, followed by radiation and chemotherapy. Doctors at Cleveland Clinic and a small number of other medical centers in the US are striving to make the process faster and less invasive with a new technique called microcoil localization, which can pinpoint and remove small bits of affected tissue using a needle inserted through the chest to get rid of cancer at its earliest stage.
Minimally invasive surgery results in less pain, shorter hospital stays and less scarring and possible injury to surrounding tissues.
Taking a Watch-and-Wait Approach
They can not get enough of "slash, poison and burn" approach using surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. But it is more likely that some cancers can not grow and pose a problem. This conservative management approach might be particularly valuable for many types of prostate cancers, says Brawley. There are many people who are diagnosed with this condition, which causes unpleasant side effects such as impotence and incontinence. What can we do with our approach today, slow-growing tumor types including thyroid, breast (DCIS), and certain types of blood cancers, research finds .
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