Breast Reconstruction in Breast Cancer; To Do Before or After Radiotherapy?

Oncoplastic Breast Surgery Oncoplastic breast surgery is an advancement in breast cancer surgery to achieve widened surgical margin and to optimize cosmetic outcome while maintaining reduced local recurrence rate altogether. The importance of a woman's breasts shouldn't be underestimated as it provide a sense of being whole to a woman. Some women would rather avoid …

Management of Bone Metastasis with Radiotherapy

Introduction In solid tumours, bone metastasis most commonly happen in prostate, breast and lung cancers. In vertebra spine, bone metastasis can cause catastrophic compression fracture (bone fracture that compresses the spinal cord) which leads to: paraplegia (paralysis of both lower legs) quadriplegia (paralysis of both upper and lower limbs if compression fracture happened at higher …

Head & Neck Cancer (HNC): Curative Treatment with Radiotherapy and Chemotherapy

A pleasant lady, 53 years old with long standing hypertension, presented with dysphagia symptom for 3 months duration. She was diagnosed with base of tongue SCC, T2N3M0. Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) Discussion Surgery or definitive concurrent chemo-radiotherapy (CRT)? Surgeon want to operate, I want definitive concurrent CRT (happened all the time during discussion) Rationale? With surgery, …

Living Longer: Locally Advanced Pancreatic Cancer (2)

If the locally advanced pancreatic cancer is unresectable, what other option does the patient has? As clinical oncologist, it's nice to have another arsenal against cancer; radiotherapy. Pre-operative chemo-radiation is effective in locally advanced pancreatic cancer to convert it from borderline resectable/ unresectable to resectable. By giving chemotherapy and radiotherapy together, studies showed that up to …