Thursday 22 September 2022 01:02 AM Flawed breast cancer surgeries leave thousands of women at risk of a relapse, ... trends now

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Breast cancer surgery guidelines are leaving thousands of women at risk of the disease returning, a major review has found.

Around one in five women who undergo treatment to remove tumours are having insufficient breast tissue removed, researchers say.

This leaves them with a much higher chance of cancer recurring in the breast or elsewhere, making it incurable. Breast cancer is the second most deadly cancer for women, causing 11,400 deaths a year.

Experts said the focus had wrongly been on the cosmetic outcome of surgery, with an over-reliance on drug breakthroughs and radiotherapy to mop up any remaining cancerous cells.

But they believe thousands of lives could be saved if between one and two millimetres of healthy surrounding tissue was removed with a tumour.

In the biggest analysis of its kind, researchers from the University of Manchester compared the outcomes of 68 studies involving 112,140 patients. The chance of the recurrence of a tumour elsewhere in the body was 25.4 per cent in patients who had cancerous tissue up to the edge of what was removed.