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Canadian doctors to help pave way for a new approach to treating cervical cancer with much less pain for patients

Canadian doctors are helping to pave the way for a new approach to treating cervical cancer that promises to be much less invasive, leading to much less pain for patients. Advanced cervical cancer is often treated with hysterectomy to remove the entire cervix and uterus. As well, a lymphadenectomy is also performed to remove all the lymph nodes in the pelvis.

Removing the lymph nodes is thought to be a good way to slow disease spread, since lymph nodes are the first sites where cancer spreads if it is on the move.

With this new approach, doctors say it's possible to remove just the tissue at risk, as well as what they call "sentinel nodes." Sentinel lymph node biopsy removes just one or two lymph nodes that drain from the tumour. If a cancer has spread from the tumour site, it will show up first in these "sentinel" nodes first.

If these nodes are shown to be free from cancer, doctors know that the cancer hasn't spread, or metastasized, to other parts of the body.

Sentinel lymph node biopsy is already widely used in breast and vulva cancers as well as melanoma. It allows doctors to spare patients the pain and chronic swelling that can take hold when all the pelvic lymph nodes are removed.

Dr. Allan Covens, a surgical oncologist and head of the gynecology cancer care team at Sunnybrook's Odette Cancer Centre in Toronto has been leading a team that has been testing sentinel node biopsy in cervical cancer patients. He says the approach reduces complication for patients.

"From a complication point of view, it's amazing," Covens reports. "We never see leg swelling, there is a reduction in nerve damage and obviously, it is quicker to do." They're also finding the method is effective at spotting metastatic cancer.

In fact, recent research published in Gynecologic Oncology has found a metastatic cancer detection rate almost three times higher with sentinel lymph node biopsy compared to lymphadenectomy. The higher detection rate might be due to the extensive sectioning performed on sentinel lymph node biopsy, the researchers suggest.

So far, only a few centres in the world are using this technique for cervical cancer patients, but researchers believe in time, this may become the standard of care.

Source: CTV