ME Cure Healthcare in conjunction with Ikeja City Mall and Pacemaker Pharmaceuticals on Friday joined forces to create awareness about breast cancer during this year’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
The event with the year’s theme: “No one should face breast cancer alone” was organised by Me cure cancer centre.
At the event, the consultant clinical and radiation oncologist and Medical Director, Me Cure Cancer Centre, Dr Adeoluwa Adeniji said the aim is to commemorate Breast Cancer Awareness Day celebrated on 18th day of October.
According to him, “the goal is for people to know more about breast cancer, what to do to prevent it and also what to do to detect it early if they have breast cancer.”
Speaking with Sunday Tribune, Dr Adeniji said “The target audience as you can see at the Ikeja City Mall is the public, the people on the road and the mall has provided that.”
Explaining further, he said, “The key messages are to emphasize that breast cancer can be prevented. “There are things to do and also breast cancer can be detected early. We also want to emphasize the theme of this year’s breast cancer awareness which says no one should face breast cancer alone. So, that support from countries, from the medical world and from family is highly needed.”
With high hopes, Dr Adeniji said, the expected outcome from the programme is that people are able to remove the stigma of going to the hospital to do a routine test to prevent breast cancer and be able to detect cancer early.
“Also people should have to know the right place to go to screen and where to receive treatment when it is there.”
Explaining the common myths, risk factors and advancement in cancer management Dr Adeniji said, “Common risk factors are genetic, age and also race can be a risk factor and there are some other risk factors which include family planning pills, exposure to radiation and family history of breast cancer.”
According to him, “the early signs of breast cancer can include small lumps in the breast when it is painless and this lump can be under the armpit, it can be dimples on the skin and the nipple can be inverted. These are the early signs. That is why routine tests are important because some of these signs might not be obvious at the beginning.
“There are also many types of breast cancer but triple-negative breast cancer is the most aggressive and it is seen more among the blacks and the most commonest type you find in Nigeria and we tried to know the type so that we can know the right treatment option.”
About cancer treatment, Adeniji said, the latest advancements in cancer treatment keep changing every day. But number one is immunotherapy in breast cancer which wasn’t there before and there are other innovative approaches in chemotherapy.
“There are different types of chemotherapy that are coming up now and also there are different types of radiation treatment to target the lump without affecting the surrounding tissue or structures.”
About survival rates he said because breast cancer forms the highest mortality that is related to cancer all over Nigeria, so, because of that, the mortality itself is about 18.1 percent of the total mortality that is related to the entire cancer unlike what we have in other parts of the world. For example,the 1st year survival rate in Nigeria is about 70 percent, 2nd year survival is about 50 percent while 5 years survival is about 33 percent.
For myths or misconceptions, he explained that, one of the misconceptions about cancer is that, when people have breast cancer and you shake hands with the person, the person will also get breast cancer and there is another one that says when a family member has breast cancer, automatically the other person has cancer.
“These misconceptions are not true and lastly there is another one that says when people take chemotherapy, they will automatically die, that chemotherapy kills all the good cells, that people should not take chemotherapy. It is a big lie because if you don’t treat the cancer,it will spread and overwhelm the body and the person can die from there and there are so many other ones that say people should not remove their breast and so on. These are the common myths that patients present to us when they come to the hospital.
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