On the eve of International Women's Day, Mumbai based Dr L H Hiranandani Hospital conducted a survey of women residing in Powai, Mumbai on March 8 for creating awareness about breast cancer.

Dr Prasad Raj Dandekar, consultant radiation oncologist, Hiranandani Hospital said, “We take it as our social responsibility to increase public awareness about breast cancer by conducting regular lectures at various corporate offices or social gatherings by specialist which highlight preventive and diagnostic aspects of breast cancer. We also offer free consultations for all the ladies who has registered for the survey, individuals who were eligible, were counselled about the breast cancer screening and offered free mammography. This service has been used by a large number of ladies from the Powai region and we are hoping that we will be able to extend this service to wider regions.”

Hiranandani Hospital strives hard to provide a world class cancer care to the patients and aims to increase awareness about the disease in wider population to detect breast cancer at an early stage to improve care rates. “For this women needs to come forward and help the doctors in this cause and do a regular check up by doctors and mammography. We hope in future all these efforts will lead to improvement in cure rates,” Dr Dandekar informed.

Recently Hiranandani Hospital also set up a cancer centre in collaboration with International Oncology Services Private Limited (IOSPL) which includes well renowned breast surgeons, well equipped day care centre for chemotherapy with trained nurses and state of the art Radiation Oncology Centre. The oncologists at the centre offers the best cancer care treatment to the patient.

Dr Dandekar stressed that the incidence of breast cancer in the patients is increasing so the hospital has a separate “Breast Clinic” which is led by breast cancer specialist and target patients who have any form of breast abnormalities and screen them for cancer. For accurate and fast diagnosis, the diagnostic tests are done in close collaboration with radiologist and pathologist.

The research in breast cancer is improving and the launch of new drugs in future will increase the cure rates with less toxicity. Currently in patients who have Cerb2 receptors positive disease, receive Herceptine (trastuzumab) which is specially targeted therapy against those receptors and improves cure rates. The current research is targeting finding more active targeted molecules to enhance these results.

While delivering radiotherapy to a patient it is important to shield heart and lungs after the breast cancer surgery in order to prevent long term complications. “At our centre we have most advanced radiotherapy machine called as “TRILOGYHD MLC” which helps us to offer most accurate form of radiotherapy to the patients. We offer advanced radiotherapy techniques such as IMRT, IGRT to prevent long term side effects and reduce acute toxicity. With the help of these techniques, we are able to give maximum intensity of radiation to the breast while minimising the radiation received by surrounding normal organs such as heart, lung, other breast and spinal cord,” said Dr Dandekar.

The health care field in India is changing rapidly due to arrival of international service providers such as IOSPL which offers best diagnostic and treatment options to patients; which are at par with the best of cancer centres in the world. As a result of this a large number of international patients are coming to India for cancer treatments due to very good facilities and more affordable treatment options. The medical tourism industry is flourishing in India due to these reasons and large numbers of patients are opting to come to India for treatment.