From the first moment my wife discovered
she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even
ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have
received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than
mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started
this blog…
Every month, I’ll be highlighting breast
cancer research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites,
journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and
share them with you. Today:
I wrote about
vascularized lymph node transfer about a year ago here:
I found this
website today – it has a short video you might want to watch if this is a
subject that interests you, if you are considering having the procedure done,
or if you’ve never heard of it: http://www.cancercenter.com/video/treatments-technology/vascularized-lymph-node-transfer/
However, when I
first began to look into this subject, I realized that what I REALLY wanted to
see is something I discovered today – lymphaticovenular bypass surgery.
Here’s a brief
video that shows how it’s done: http://www.cancercenter.com/video/treatments-technology/lymphaticovenular-bypass-surgery/
Clearly research
is moving forward as technology advances and techniques are developed. Today, I
found this: “minimally invasive free vascularized omental lymphatic flap”.
According to the abstract (here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27439587),
there is an 83% success rate and a 22% decrease in the size of the affected
limb.
So what does this
mean? First: “omental”. The omentum is a large piece of tissue attached to the
lower part of the stomach. It has blood vessels as well as several lymph nodes.
A section of this tissue is removed by a surgeon using a microscope and moved
to the place where the original lymph nodes were taken when breast cancer was
first discovered. The tissue is attached and the incision is closed up after
all of the blood vessels and lymph vessels are reconnected. It would look very
similar to the first video.
That’s all I can
find at this time, but I’ll be on this in the future as well.
Image:
No comments:
Post a Comment