Metastatic Bone Cancer: Bone Pain When Breast & Prostate Cancer Spreads
When cancer cells travel from the bone to another place on the body, it’s called metastatic cancer to the bone. Gregory Domson, MD, explains that this happens more with breast or prostate cancer. Patients will notice bone pain or a lump around a bone, and it’s a symptom of something that’s wrong.
For more information, https://uvahealth.com/services/bone-cancer
In adults, the most common form of bone cancer is when cancer from another organ has traveled to the bone. It has metastasized to the bone. That’s what you see most commonly in the adult population.
In women, it’s commonly breast cancer. In men, it’s commonly prostate cancer. The most common primary presenting symptom is pain. So, if you have bone pain, that’s going to be a clear indicator that something is going on. In some cases, you may have a painless mass, so you’ll feel a lump or a bump around a bone, and that’s an indicator that something is going on as well.
There are multiple forms of treatment. Surgically, what I do is sometimes removing the tumor, sometimes stabilizing the bone and preventing fracture. Also, there are also adjuvant treatments, like radiation treatment to the area, and medical treatment, like chemotherapy.
The biggest thing that UVA offers in treating patients with bone cancer is a multimodal approach. It’s a team approach. There’s more than one way to address these things and requires different specialists who are really good at what they do.
My job is kind of the nuts and bolts, where we want to keep the bones healthy and strong and prevent fractures, and minimize patients’ pain, keep them up and moving around when they have metastatic bone cancer. However, UVA also offers a variety of other services to treat these patients, which include radiation oncology, hematology-oncology, and a team approach.
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