<div class="block">We&#39;re raising more awareness about treatment as we hone in on Breast cancer during October. Dr. Sylvia Reyes, Northwell Health Cancer Institute, joined &#39;beWell&#39; to talk about advanced treatment options. </div>

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Be Well: Breast Cancer Tech Breakthrough

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. And research has shown that the advancements being made in breast cancer care is improving rapidly. That's right. I recently visited the Northwell Health Cancer Institute where medical experts discuss some of the new breakthroughs being made to help save lives. Breast cancer is treated in so many different ways and there have been so many different advancements. So talk to me a little bit about how you treat someone once they get that diagnosis. So once they get that diagnosis first, we wanna look at um exactly which type of breast cancer it is um different types uh may require more aggressive treatments, um like chemotherapy upfront and others may require surgery first, bigger surgery is not always better. We've learned that other options such as radiation can really replace that in certain situations. And um and so we're really able to offer less and less surgery um for, for women, this machine, we can take what's called a cone beam CT scan. So we're looking at an image of the tumor in real time on that day and we can match that with the films that we've used to do our treatment planning and with the six degree of freedom table, we're able to move that table in six directions to be able to get an exact match. And now for somebody who's a breast cancer, um patient specifically, if they have something on the left side of their body, you wanna make sure that there's no damage happening to the heart or, or any anything else. Really? Exactly. Exactly. So now we have options for smaller fields, treatment for uh shorter duration of treatment. And all of that really is made possible because our imaging is so much better as we can do with this machine so that we're able to protect normal tissue while we're able to give the same biological dose to the area that we want to treat. So that these days we're able to plan to protect heart and lung from the effects of radiation. So it's more targeted exactly where we need it than it was able to be in the past. But unfortunately, we know that everyone, you know, looking at the statistics, everyone is not getting the same care. And also biologically, we've noticed there's differences. So it's not all about access, it's not all about social structure, um, or racial structure. We found that even within different ethnicities, um there are certain genes that can put um some women at more risk of more aggressive types of breast cancer such as African American women, um specifically from like the western part of Africa um there were certain genes that at one point were protected from malaria. And so they were more inherited with those types, but yet that also can put them at risk for a triple negative type breast cancer. And so there's lots of different factors that play into why we see a difference in why um black women diagnosed with breast cancer have higher rates of, of higher death rates or lower survival rates um than, than white women. Um, some of it is, you know, when they showed up for their mammogram, um, but some of it is also biology and we're just learning more all the time. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. And there's a lot of research being done to learn more about these biological factors and also social factors that we can make a difference.