By Caribbean Medical News Staff
A Dominican GP is asking patients to get early detection for breast cancer. Describing treatment as expensive and emotionally taxing, she said that early detection may help in preventing death and helping patients to get back on their feet.
Dr. Kathleen Allen-Ferdinand, general medical practitioner and member of the Board of Trustees of the St. Kitts and Nevis Breast Cancer Patients Assistance Fund was accepting a donation of $4000 to the Trust from the TDC.
“More often than not the grants are not as big as some people would like. We certainly can’t pay for someone’s entire treatment, but every bit helps. What a lot of people do is get help from various sources, family members, work places, and everybody puts together and they are able to pay. The treatment of breast cancer, the chemotherapy, is between US$25,000 and US$50,000 depending on where you go,” she explained.
Previously patients had to go to Trinidad, Barbados or Jamaica but now the Centre is treating local patients. There is more work to be done, she suggested but right now local patients can get most services except radiation therapy. Patients requiring radiation have to go to the US invariably.
“When you get to the age of forty, historically, this is when we start recommending mammography. Worldwide, breast cancer is more common in the 50s and 60s, so 10 years before, we start screening mammography for 40-year-old women. I said historically because we are seeing in the black communities, both in the Caribbean and in North America, that a lot of black women are getting breast cancer in their 40s,” said Dr. Allen-Ferdinand.
Data suggests that women within the region may even be getting breast cancer earlier than 40 and Allen-Ferdinand is suggesting that in some cases, women may need to be tested earlier than age forty.
“We don’t know why, and it is often a very aggressive form of breast cancer, so now the question is, should we be doing mammograms at age 30. I have had patients who have had breast cancer in their 30s and 20s, so the question is should we be doing mammograms from puberty? Well, you can’t, because the mammography, the technique of compressing the breast and using high dose radiation to look into the breast cannot be done on young dense breasts. So, it’s not going to be mammography that would be screening the 20-year-old and the 30-year-old. Mammography is not helpful in that regard,” the medical doctor explained.
The doctor is hoping that advocacy and public education will be able to raise not only awareness but much needed funds to make it cheaper to get breast cancer screening and services and possibly offer radiation therapy in the future. Ideally, Allen-Ferdinand wants to see early detection so treatment can start much earlier to decrease mortality.
