Can Some Breast Cancer Tumors Regress if Left Untreated?
Little is known about how untreated breast cancer grows, because it would be considered unethical to not treat women with breast tumors. However, some types of cancer, such as metastatic melanoma, have been known to spontaneously regress or shrink on their own. And there have been about 32 reported cases of invasive breast cancer that have spontaneously regressed. Could there be some type of breast tumor, as yet unknown, that’s unlikely to grow rapidly and threaten a patient’s life? Maybe, but many doctors remain skeptical. There are reasons the study numbers don’t match, they say, including that women in the second group only had one mammogram, and there may have been more cases of cancer than were detected. Or use of hormone therapy may have differed between the two groups. “The authors try to dismiss some of the reasons why those two numbers might not be equal and they latch on to what I think is one of the more far-fetched explanations—that a large fraction of these tumors have reg
