Are Needle Biopsies Safe?

[hiddenangel]

ARE NEEDLE BIOPSIES SAFE?

By: Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D
www.cancerdecisions.com

A June 2004 report from the John Wayne Cancer Institute in California has rekindled a long-standing debate over whether or not needle biopsies are safe. The paper set out to examine whether this technique, widely used to obtain specimens in cases of suspected cancer, might itself allow malignant cells to spread from an isolated tumor to nearby lymph nodes. The authors reluctantly conclude that a needle biopsy may indeed increase the spread of the disease by 50 percent compared to patients who receive the more traditional excisional biopsies (or "lumpectomies").

This is a rigorous study, and it comes with an excellent pedigree. The lead author, Nora M. Hansen, MD, was chief surgical resident at the University of Chicago (1994-1995) before coming to the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, Calif., in 1997. She is currently Assistant Director of the Joyce Eisenberg Keefer Breast Center, Saint John's Hospital and Health Center, Santa Monica.

John Wayne Cancer Institute, a division of Saint John's Hospital, is the institution that pioneered the procedure known as sentinel node biopsy. This is a technique for identifying the first lymph node to which a tumor is likely to spread. By removing that node and examining it at the time of surgery, it is possible to predict with great accuracy whether the cancer has indeed spread. This enables the surgeon to remove only those lymph nodes that have become involved with cancer, instead of resorting to wholesale lymph node dissection, a procedure which can leave a patient with long-term pain, edema, disfigurement and impairment of limb mobility.

The report was published in a prestigious journal, the American Medical Association's Archives of Surgery, which has been published continuously since 1885. The study was conducted by a team of John Wayne scientists which, in addition to Dr. Hansen, included Armando G. Giuliano, MD, chairman of the American College of Surgeons Breast Oncology Committee and the author of over 200 scientific articles on breast cancer. I emphasize the credentials of the study's authors in order to make the point that this is a group of well-respected clinicians and assuredly not a group of mavericks.

Hansen and her colleagues wanted to discover whether the common method used to obtain specimens from a breast tumor influenced the subsequent spread of disease to the sentinel node (SN). She and her colleagues therefore studied 663 women who were known to have breast cancer. Of these, about half had been biopsied with a needle — either a fine needle aspiration (FNA) or a large-gauge needle core biopsy. The other half had undergone the physical removal of their tumor (i.e., an excisional biopsy or lumpectomy). The study found that women who had had either kind of needle biopsy were fifty percent more likely to have cancer in their sentinel nodes than women who underwent the surgical removal of the whole tumor with excisional biopsy.

The report's authors state: "Manipulation of an intact tumor by FNA or large-gauge needle core biopsy is associated with an increase in the incidence of SN metastases, perhaps due in part to the mechanical disruption of the tumor by the needle." This is a discreet way of saying that needle biopsy, an increasingly common procedure, was itself responsible for spreading the cancer, although the authors take pains to qualify this disturbing conclusion by suggesting that not every cluster of cancer cells found in the regional lymph nodes will inevitably end up developing into clinically apparent cancer.

The implications of this study are vast, since patients who are found to have cancer in their lymph nodes are automatically classified at a higher stage and therefore face much more extensive treatment than those who have small tumors that are limited to the breast.

Instead of being told that they have stage I cancer and that surgery "got it all," they are now delivered the frightening news that the cancer has spread outside its capsule and gotten into the lymphatic system. They then face the possible dissection of the affected chain of lymph nodes and aggressive chemotherapy, radiation and/or hormonal therapy to wipe out the stray cancer cells (Chu 1999).

The report also potentially throws a monkey wrench into the smooth running early detection 'machine' that every year identifies and treats hundreds of thousands of Americans with cancer. Indeed, over the last few decades the needle biopsy has become an essential element in the detection not only of breast cancer, but also of many other kinds of cancer. The advantages of the technique are many: needle biopsies are nearly painless and bloodless in-office procedures, and much less expensive and time-consuming than surgical biopsies. The procedure consists of a hollow needle being inserted into a suspected tumor in order to retrieve samples for microscopic examination. In certain cases the tumor may have to be punctured four to six separate times in the process of obtaining adequate tissue for diagnostic purposes.


Get a Band-Aid and Go Home

Is it really safe to puncture a tumor in this way, especially when the tumor is anatomically walled off or encapsulated from the rest of the body? Isn't this running the risk of spreading the disease, either into the track formed by the needle, or, worse, by spilling cells directly into the lymphatic system or bloodstream? Has this procedure really been carefully thought out and researched before being implemented on such a massive scale?

To read the mainstream media, you would think that the medical profession is uniformly in favor of this procedure. For example:

• A 1999 report in the Journal of American Medical Association enthusiastically endorsed the use of needle biopsies.

• "A painful surgical biopsy of breast tissue may no longer be necessary," a CNN website enthused, in interpreting the study. Needle biopsies are "just as reliable, less expensive, and more comfortable" than the surgical alternative for diagnosing breast cancer" (Salvatore 1999).

• Jack E. Meyer and colleagues at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital reviewed 1,836 cases of breast cancer diagnosed with the aid of a needle. They found large-core needle biopsies "accurate, safe and well accepted by patients and referring physicians." Instead of an operation, with local or general anesthesia, and possible deformation of the breast, patients experienced a one-hour in-office procedure.

"When the procedure's over you get a Band-Aid and you go home," said Meyer (Salvatore 1999).


Win-Win

To summarize: in principle the needle biopsy seems like a win-win situation. It is a simple office procedure, convenient, bloodless and virtually pain-free for patients. One would certainly not dispense with a test like this for trivial reasons. Currently, 1.2 million US women a year undergo breast biopsies. Between 20 and 25 percent of these tests show cancer, according to Dr. Neil Gorrin, assistant chief of surgery at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in South San Francisco (Viddya 2001). That means that virtually all the women in the US who were diagnosed with breast cancer (215,990 this year) went through this procedure.

Yet concerns have been raised about the safety of invasive biopsies since they were first introduced more than a century ago.

The surgical biopsy first came to prominence in the 1870s, through the work of Carl Ruge and Johan Veit of the University of Berlin, who showed that only 10 out of 23 women who had undergone surgery for cervical cancer actually turned out to have the disease. At that time, surgeons in their arrogance simply assumed that they could recognize cancer when they saw it: they viewed the suggestion that tumors should be biopsied before excision as a direct challenge to their diagnostic and clinical acumen. But the work of Ruge and Veit effectively changed the prevailing tide of opinion.

Remarkably, fine needle biopsies - described as "a new instrument for the diagnosis of tumors" - were first reported for head-and-neck cancer by M. Kun in 1847. They were soon forgotten, but were subsequently revived by Hayes E. Martin, MD, and Edward B. Ellis, MD, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering, in the 1920s (Martin 1930). Needle biopsies were performed on a large scale at Memorial in the 1930s; however, the technique did not gain many adherents in the US during that time. Needle biopsies later underwent a resurgence in Scandinavia during the 1950s and 1960s, and it was from there that the trend spread to the rest of the world, including back to the United States (Das 2003).

By the time of World War I biopsy became routine practice in the US, endorsed by both the American Cancer Society and the American Medical Association.

However, by no means everyone in the medical establishment was convinced that biopsy was an unqualified good. James Ewing, the dean of American cancer pathologists, explicitly condemned puncturing unbroken skin for the purpose of sampling deeper lesions. He wrote: "It is especially to be avoided with...tumors of the breast, and all growths in which incisions of the skin involve also incisions through the tumor capsule" (Pack 1940: 43).

That would of course preclude most of the situations in which needle biopsies are currently done.

Ewing was not alone. The editor of the influential New York Medical Record had this to say on the subject:

"[O]ne who harpoons or excises a piece of tissue from a tumor with unbroken cutaneous or mucous surface, especially an encapsulated tumor, and then waits a day or two while the specimen is being examined, will almost inevitably destroy his patient's chance of recovery by operation....To resort to indiscriminate digging into all tumors on the chance of thereby reaching a diagnosis, which can usually be made by safer measures, and which moreover is not absolutely necessary, is positively wicked...." (Pack 1940).

Strong words! The author ends on a peculiarly modern note: "[A] physician acting on this advice would have no defense whatever if the heirs of his patient should bring a malpractice suit" (cited in Pack 1940:44).