Breast Cancer Clinical Care, Research Advances

Dr. Nikoo Rajaee will soon run a clinical trial at the Cross Cancer Institute

Onconoplastic surgeon Dr. Nikoo Rajaee expects to run a trial of radioactive iodine seed localization in October at the Cross Cancer Institute (CCI). Her Master of Health Evaluation practicum at the CCI involved performing a needs assessment for such a program as another method for mapping breast cancers pre-operatively. Dr. Rajaee says, “This method has higher overall patient satisfaction compared to wire-localization and improves operating room efficiency.”

She is also involved in an initiative headed by Dr. David Olson: pre-intervention cases discussion at weekly multi-disciplinary tumour board rounds. “This collaborative approach with input from radiation and medical oncologists and other surgeons improves overall breast cancer care.” Dr. Rajaee says.

Soon, Dr. Lashan Peiris’ research team aims to submit a paper for publication that looks at the quality of life after oncoplastic breast surgery. Dr. Peiris says, “We are aiming to show that quality of life is not affected when this type of surgery is performed: we ended up showing that quality of life improves in this subset of patients. This is a far cry from the significant quality of life and depressive issues that some patients were left with, due to the at-times significant breast deformity and asymmetry they were left with after breast cancer treatment.” It shows that postoperative complications were lower than those reported in equivalent studies in the literature.