Swollen lymph nodes may not be always cancerous. It could be swollen due to the formation of an abscess or it could also be due to presence of cancerous cells. But sadly there is no definite way through which you can confirm the cause of the swelling except biopsy. There are basically two ways through which the examination of the lymph nodes can be carried out. First is the standard axillary node dissection and second is the sentinel lymph node biopsy which is being conducted on selected person suffering from breast cancer.
In the standard axillary node dissection, the patient is required to remove about 10-30 lymph nodes for examination which in most of the cases results in lymphedema. In the SLN biopsy, removal of only 1-3 lymph nodes suffices the purpose. Though research on the SLN biopsy is still going however, it has been proved that removal of less lymph node decreases the chances of developing lymphedema. But after the examination of the lymph node, if the sentinel nodes are found to be cancerous then a complete removal of the nodes through axillary dissection is performed.
Numerous studies have been conducted on the metastatic tumor and a number of them are still going on to find out the risk associated with isolated tumor cells in the sentinel lymph nodes. And so far no studies have been able to reveal any consistent result and there has been no standard recommendation for axillary lymph node dissection. Thus the need for the standard axillary dissection of lymph nodes after detecting the presence cancerous cells in the sentinel lymph node is still controversial.
A number of physicians are of the opinion that those patients who had been diagnosed with breast cancer must be cautious about any enlarged lymph nodes that persists more than a month or so. A biopsy must be performed since the chances of cancerous cells being present are quite high. It must be cautioned there is a high chance of missing the cancer cells if a needle biopsy is performed instead of surgically removing the whole node.
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