More Than 8 Weeks Between Diagnosis & Surgery Affects Survival
More Than Eight Weeks Between Breast Cancer Diagnosis and Surgery Affects Survival
Mar 2, 2023
If more than eight weeks passes between early-stage breast cancer diagnosis and surgery, survival is worse. Read more...
Comments
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I read this and the UK has got a serious problem on their hands. They have issues getting women in for treatment before 90 days much less 8 weeks. In the US this doesn't seem as common an issue but studies like this go to show you that even with a slow growing cancer, the less time to surgery the better.
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I think this topic name is misleading and potentially fear mongering. On your own info page, the study describes itself as finding an association between longer wait time and worse survival, not causation. It identifies correlating factors like being younger, having worse or no insurance, and having a lower household income, all of which I believe are independently linked to worse survival rates.
It sounds to me like a longer wait should cause a woman to potentially be concerned about the quality of healthcare available to her, rather than the wait itself being an actual causative factor of worse outcomes. But most of us don't actually have that much power over the quality of healthcare available to us, and of course we cannot change our age...
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also curious to definitions, is it confirmed biopsy as diagnosis or is the timing from a suspicious mammogram
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I'm hoping someone can edit this title so that it reflects the study, which does not claim to find causation.
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Thank you Salamandra. Agreed this is misleading.
In fact, the associations they found w/ poor or no insurance & low income may be the primary drivers here. If you're working one to two part-time jobs w/o benefits, taking time off is challenging. If you're low income it's likely that you're single—you may very well be the primary carer of small children as well as elderly parents. You're likely to not have a large community come together to help you, including professional peers if you've got a well-paid job.
Women who can quickly drop everything for surgery & temporarily disabling adjuvant treatments will be more likely to have better insurance, affluence, and a strong support network, thus leading to better all-cause outcomes.
If you lack any or all of those benefits, you're probably less likely to get appropriate preventative or diagnostic treatment moving forward for new symptoms related to BC or any other health problem. And the lack of any or all of these things will contribute to stress, to self-medication w/ alcohol, smoking, and/or overeating, w/ inability to take time to have nutritious, plant-based food, to have a network of friends, healthy exercise, etc.
This "story" however well-meaning is misleading and like so many other "studies" vastly mischaracterizes the reality of life for many women, particularly low-income & minority.0 -
So the longer you keep untreated cancer in your body the worst outcome. Well, this is common sense and instead of wasting funds on these findings, why don't they use these funds to find a cure? 42 thousand of us are dying every year in the USA alone. Find the cure!
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