Endocrine Therapy Breast Cancer

Dr Nicole Yap specialises in endocrine therapy for breast cancer in Melbourne.

What is Endocrine Therapy?

The human endocrine system produces different types of hormones that affect many parts of the body. There are two main hormones that mostly affect cancers, which are estrogen and progesterone.

Because these two hormones can influence and grow some times of cancers, there are types of cancers that are categorised by the names of these hormones and treated with endocrine therapy for breast cancer Melbourne. With testing, doctors are able to see which hormones affect the cancer cells or not, and that can empower the type of treatment and therapy that patients undergo.

Types of endocrine therapy for breast cancer:

As a treatment for cancers that are affected by progesterone and estrogen doctors can do hormonal therapy. In Melbourne types of endocrine therapy for breast cancer can inhibit the growth of cancers by stopping or slowing the cancerous cell growth. This type of treatment will only work on cancers that are specifically hormone positive, and will not impact other types of cancer.

Other types of Endocrine therapy for breast cancer.

There are other types of hormone therapy like hormone therapy for gender reassignment and estrogen therapy for symptoms of menopause. The latter is to treat an age specific phenomenon that women go through which is affected by hormones and can have a number of unpleasant and sometimes chronic symptoms. It is very important not to confuse these types and other types of hormone therapy with endocrine therapy for breast cancer as these can actually grow cancer cells, which can be of huge detriment to people battling the disease.

Hormone therapy types for breast cancer.

Typically the main way to treat breast cancer with hormone therapy involves blocking the functions of the ovaries. There are several ways to do this and the effects of this are usually permanent. Ovary inhibitors include:

• Surgery to remove the ovaries entirely
• Drugs that interfere with hormone signals and therefor delay/ stop most of the effects of ovary function
• Drugs that bind to the hormone receptors and block ovary function entirely

If you would like to know more about endocrine therapy for breast cancer in Melbourne, contact Dr Yap now!