Does lumpectomy makes the cancer cells spread?

Do you mean surgery in general, or lumpectomy vs. mastectomy?

The goal of surgery is to remove all the cancer in the breast. If all the cancer has been removed, it can't spread.

After a lumpectomy, usually radiation is given. The purpose of radiation is to mop up any rogue cells that might still be left in the breast after the surgery. The combination of lumpectomy + radiation is at least as effective, if not more effective, than a mastectomy, based on numerous studies that have compared survival rates for both types of surgery.

In most cases where breast cancer has spread beyond the breast, the movement of the cancer cells took place before surgery and usually before the cancer was even diagnosed, during the time when the cancer was developing in the breast. Most breast cancers have been in the breast several years before the area of cancer is large enough to be detected. This is the time when the cancer might spread.

No. Lumpectomy will not cause your cancer to spread. It is possible that after the pathology report comes back the breast surgeon did not get enough as good as they are are or as hard as they try. Then they do re-execission surgery but it is not caused by "spreading cancer" at all.

Not exactly. Surgeons try to take wide margins and if the margins come back dirty they cut until they get clear margins when possible.

So seeding is not often the culprit in distant metastasis with breast cancer.

What they have found is that some cancer cells spread early and then go in to a dormant state.

When the body is injured, cell signaling pathways that promote healing are activated, and this cell signaling can awaken dormant cancer cells.

That being said, surgery, when possible, is still the most curative treatment for breast cancer and while women who have had lumpectomies might have, or in the past had, more local recurrences, they do not necessarily have a higher overall long term mortality rate than women who have had mastectomies.

At this point in time, cutting the cancer out, when possible, is better than not.

santabarbarian:

They wouldn't give me Ketorolac due to the bleeding risk but they gave me dexamethasone which can also reduce the chance of metastasis.

But I was having a BMX and my platelets were still a bit low. Maybe for a lumpectomy they would have been ok with giving it to me.

My point is that if it is at all relevant relevant to future metastases how the surgery is handled and what anesthetics are used, then clearly something about surgery must be a possible trigger (or not, if handled correctly). If all migration happened prior to surgery, or if post surgery inflammation was not a possible driver of metastases, then ketorolac would not make a difference. But it does...

It's funny ... I was in the surgery room, I had my eyes closed and the internal anesthetist was giving me oxygen before anesthesia... then showed up the chief of anesthesia and began discussing this issue with the anesthetist who was holding my mask... He thought I was asleep! What a reassuring talk to listen 2 minutes before surgery ... LOL