Type of Surgery
Information
Last updated: 02/17/2009
A technique designed to spare the unnecessary removal of normal lymph nodes is called sentinel node biopsy. When lymph fluid moves out of a region, the sentinel lymph node is the first node it reaches. The theory behind sentinel lymph node biopsy...
is that if cancer is not present in the sentinel node, it is unlikely to have spread to other nearby nodes. This procedure may allow individuals with early stage cancers to avoid the complications associated with partial or radical removal of lymph nodes if there is little or no chance that cancer has spread to them.
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Other Information
Lymphadenectomy consists of the surgical removal of one or more groups of lymph nodes. It is almost always performed as part of the surgical management of cancer.
This is usually done because many types of cancer have a marked tendency to produce lymph node metastasis early on in their natural history. This is particularly true of melanoma, head and neck cancer, differentiated thyroid cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, gastric cancer and colorectal cancer. Famed British surgeon Sir Berkeley Moynihan once remarked that "the surgery of cancer is not the surgery of organs; it is the surgery of the lymphatic system".
The better known examples of lymphadenectomy are axillary lymph node dissection for breast cancer; radical neck dissection for head and neck cancer and thyroid cancer; D2 lymphadenectomy for gastric cancer; and total mesorectal excision for rectal cancer.
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