Why does the arm-pit or axilla need treatment when treating breast cancer?

Mr. Bakoji, the mastectomy or the wide local excision from the breast is, you know, it seems to make sense, but in order to treat your breast cancer you need to treat the axilla or armpit as well. Can you tell us about that? Yes, so modern treatment of breast cancer is where you try and minimize the amount of surgery, so increasingly fewer women are having mastectomy and those who need mastectomy if they are well and fit and motivated enough will be offered an immediate reconstruction which means they come in after cancer they cannot have the mastectomy but before they leave theatre the breast is reconstructed. Now increasingly for a lot of women we can actually downstage the cancer and do what we call a lumpectomy or white blockal excision but there's also a different technique called therapeutic myeloplasty where you to combine maxopexy, where you lift the breast up, you tighten the skin envelope, and at the same time you do contralateral so that the outcome, after treatment for breast cancer, the breasts are even better looking than before the patient was diagnosed with cancer. And in terms of the armpit, how do you treat that? So if the patient has invasive cancer, then part of the treatment will involve what we call sentinel lymph node biopsy, where we target of the many lymph nodes in the axilla, which particular lymph node or a group of lymph nodes that drain the breast tissue, and we target and take them out. The whole idea is to minimize the morbidity from axillary surgery. You lower the risk of lymphedema from about 30% to less than 5%, meaning that from one in four women having lymphedema less than 1 in 20. And that's that treatment of the armpit improves the long-term outcome from that? It certainly does in terms of the patient's outcome and overall quality of life. Thank you.