VIDEO: Continued surveillance for metastatic disease in breast cancer

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

I sort of think of this in two different categories. So one is for patients who have metastatic disease we obviously do survey them very closely because we want to understand whether the treatment they're receiving is working and we want to look for progression and hopefully we will catch it before people have symptomatic progression. But for patients with early stage breast cancer we don't generally do surveillance imaging other than mammography in patients who have intact breasts supplemented by MRI according to genetic and other risk factors. But there, you know, have been these old trials now many decades old that looked at the use of routine liver, bone and lung imaging, as well as blood tests in patients with early stage breast cancer really showing no survival benefit of routine surveillance. I think the big question in the surveillance space is whether some of the new technologies like blood based minimal residual disease technologies will change what we do for surveillance in early stage disease but that's still yet to be fully understood what the role of those assays might be.