Treatment overview for breast cancer

The first treatment for breast cancer is usually surgery to remove it. After surgery, you may have treatments to reduce the risk of the cancer coming back. These treatments can include:

• radiotherapy
• hormonal therapy
• chemotherapy
• targeted and immunotherapy drugs, such as trastuzumab.

You may sometimes have these treatments before you have surgery.

You may have drugs called bisphosphonates to reduce the risk of breast cancer coming back. These can also be used to protect your bones from the side effects of some types of hormonal therapy and chemotherapy.

Your doctors look at different factors to help decide which treatments are likely to work best for you. These include:

• the stage and grade of the cancer
• if the cancer cells have oestrogen receptors (ER positive)
• if the cancer has HER2 receptors (HER2 positive).

Your cancer doctor and breast care nurse will explain the treatments that they think are best for you. They can help you make decisions about your treatment.

Treatments for breast cancer are improving. Better treatments mean that more people are cured or living longer. Your cancer doctor may ask you if you would like to take part in a clinical trial.

We understand that having treatment can be a difficult time for people. We're here to support you. If you want to talk, you can:

• Call the Macmillan Support Line for free on 0808 808 00 00. 
• Chat to our specialists online. 
• Visit our breast cancer forum to talk with people who have been affected by breast cancer, share your experience, and ask an expert your questions. 

If you have been diagnosed with cancer and you are pregnant or breastfeeding, we have more information.

Your surgeon will talk to you about having 1 of these operations:

• breast-conserving surgery – this involves removing the cancer and some surrounding normal breast tissue
• a mastectomy – this involves removing all the breast tissue and sometimes the nipple on the affected side.

Most men only have a small amount of breast tissue. This means they can usually only have a mastectomy.

You will usually need some or all the lymph nodes in your armpit removed. This is done in both of these operations.

You may want to have a new breast shape made during the operation. This is called breast reconstruction. You can choose to have it done at a later time.

We want everyone affected by cancer to feel our information is written for them.

We want our information to be as clear as possible. To do this, we try to:

• use plain English
• explain medical words
• use short sentences
• use illustrations to explain text
• structure the information clearly
• make sure important points are clear.

We use gender-inclusive language and talk to our readers as ‘you’ so that everyone feels included. Where clinically necessary we use the terms ‘men’ and ‘women’ or ‘male’ and ‘female’. For example, we do so when talking about parts of the body or mentioning statistics or research about who is affected.

You can read more about how we produce our information here.