In a new study, the authors found that the addition of a local anesthetic to general anesthesia during breast cancer surgery reduced breast cancer recurrences and death by greater than 60%!! Not surprisingly, this also reduced postoperative pain.
Many surgeons rely solely on general anesthesia for breast cancer surgery and do not use local anesthetic.
I see no downside to recommending this very simple and inexpensive addition to breast cancer surgery. Clearly these results need to be confirmed in a larger study, but it looks promising.
Might this benefit also be seen with cancer surgeries of different tumor types and anatomical locations?
