A Myrtle Beach doctor is working to provide a treatment that is potentially less traumatic for patients suffering from breast cancer.
This treatment method, cryoablation, is hard to come by because not many doctors are trained in performing it.
Dr. Hania Bednarski of Serenity Surgery & Wellness in Myrtle Beach is trained in cryoablation and has treated patients who praise her technique in a spa-like environment.
“I was in private practice in Southern Illinois for about 10 years, so I have been doing cryoablation since 2013,” Bednarski said. “So all in all, I’ve probably treated about 50 benign tumors and probably 20+ malignant tumors.”
How it works
Cryoablation is non-surgical and it essentially freezes cancerous or non-cancerous tissue, Bednarski said.
“We do it in my office and it's done under local anesthesia, so the patient is awake for the procedure the entire time,” she said. “I numb the skin really well and I make sure that they're very comfortable.
“We wait for that numbing medicine to work and once that's done, I make a tiny incision in the breast. So the incision is about three or four millimeters, it's just big enough to get the needle in and then I place that probe through the tumor and we watch with ultrasound the entire time to make sure that the probe is appropriately positioned and once it's in place, we, under ultrasound, start freezing the tumor.”
Bednarski said the whole process, depending on the size of the tumor, can take “as little as 30 minutes.”
“The machine is hooked up to a liquid nitrogen tank and the liquid nitrogen never actually goes into the patient's body,” she said. “The liquid nitrogen is cycled through the probe and then the probe is cooled and then externally cools the tissue. So the liquid nitrogen never leaves the probe itself and the tissue, that's the mass, is what we can watch under ultrasound as it turns into an ice ball and this gets down to negative 180 degrees Celsius right around the probe. So it gets really, really cold.”
The patient cannot feel the cold sensation and Bednarski even said that the coldness adds to the numbing.
“So they're actually numbed with the numbing medicine and then they're numbed further with just the coldness of the procedure,” Bednarski said. “We watch under ultrasound to make sure that the entire mass is engulfed.”
When the mass is cancerous, according to Bednarski, she freezes a small margin of tissue around the cancerous mass in addition to engulfing the mass itself to ensure all diseased tissue is killed.
Who qualifies
Breast cancer is a common killer of women and if it doesn't take one's life, it is, at the very least, life-altering and traumatizing. It is second to skin cancer in the most common types of cancers to occur in women in the U.S., according to data from the American Cancer Society.
Bednarski said that cryoablation is used mostly for fibroadenomas which are non-cancerous breast lumps, according to the Mayo Clinic.
“Fibroadenomas are the most common benign tumor for women,” Bednarski said. “They occur in about 40% of women in their teens through their 30s. And once a woman has one, then she's much more likely to have multiple tumors.
“They're more common in women who are on birth control, they're more common in women who have a family history and a lot of times they can be painful, or they're simply big and when a woman feels it, she gets really anxious, even when she's told that it's a benign tumor and so for those reasons, a lot of women elect to do something about it. And other than cryoablation, the only other option is surgery.”
Bednarski said that some women elect for cryoablation because it has the potential to not decrease the volume of the breast, whereas many surgeries would result in a decrease in volume in the breast.
The Federal Drug Administration has not approved cryoablation to be used on cancerous breast tumors, but patients can still receive the treatment for their cancerous breast tumors, Bednarski said.
“My website is serenitysurgery.com and we actually have a contact form that women can ask to be seen there. And the way that I do this is I usually ask for their pathology report, their imaging report, and I also review all of their images, like their MRI, their mammogram and their ultrasound, and then we do a tele visit, and see if they're truly a candidate to have this done,” Bednarski said. “If the women are here in the area, then I can see them in person and that makes things a little bit easier.”
Some of Bednarski’s patients do not live in the Myrtle Beach area and were willing to travel to receive cryoablation from Bednarski.
“I'm a big fan of the procedure and I'm a big fan of Dr. Bednarski and so it was worth it for me to drive up on Thursday, stay in an Airbnb in Myrtle Beach right near the ocean and then I had the procedure on Friday, stayed Friday night and drove back to Florida on Saturday,” said Janet Lancaster, a breast cancer patient who had cryoablation performed in August.
Why cryoablation is not commonly used
Why cryoablation is not more commonly used as a method to treat breast cancer is something Bednarski said she “always wonders about.”
“I think that there are a couple of reasons. First of all, the person doing the procedure has to be really skilled in ultrasound techniques. And, unfortunately, that's not always the case,” she said. “Secondly, you have to be willing to do something a little bit out of the box, because this is a procedure that is still considered experimental in some ways.”
Bednarski said that another potential reason as to why this method is not more widely used is because it is not a money-maker for hospitals or pharmaceutical companies.
“This is entirely done in an office space. And so, quite honestly, potentially, hospitals don't make money from this because there's no anesthesia involved, there's no [operating room] time,” she said.
Lancaster said that “cancer is a very big business” and that it is “very unfortunate” that cryoablation is not more commonly used.
Has cryoablation been proven successful?
IceCure Medical is the company that makes the machine called ProSense that Bednarski uses to perform the procedure.
“In 2014, [IceCure] launched the landmark, multi-center ICE3 trial of office-based cryoablation for certain breast cancer as a minimally invasive option, with a five-year follow up, to determine disease-free survival,” according to a release from the company. “Promising Interim Results were presented at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Breast Surgeons by Richard E. Fine.
“194 patients were eligible for cryoablation [and] 49 patients completed 5 years of follow up since June 2021 [and] 97.94% (190 out of 194) patients are recurrence free as of April 2021.”
Margaret Anne DeLuca, a patient of Bednarski who received cryoablation in August 2021, is now in remission.
“I was blessed to have [cryoablation] because there was no cutting, surgery or anything like that,” she said. “Dr. Bednarski is an unbelievable doctor. She's so caring with her patients and it was so good, she almost had it like a spa in there.”
Serenity Surgery & Wellness is located at 1110 London St, Suite 101 in Myrtle Beach and women looking to find out if they are a candidate for cryoablation can schedule a free consultation with Bednarski by visiting her website.
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