Improving the quality of life for breast cancer survivors is the goal for a group of researchers at the University of Saskatchewan.

Dr. Angelica Lang, an assistant professor in the USask College of Medicine, says it is a common occurrence for women to experience severe shoulder pain, weakness, or swelling following an invasive breast cancer removal surgery. Her team hopes to determine which surgeries cause the most pain, to better inform patients of their options before they choose a treatment. “If we can understand how the different treatments might be associated with secondary injuries or any type of dysfunction, then hopefully we can prevent some of these issues from happening or better treat them,” she explained. “Not everybody is as well-informed as they need to be coming out of the different treatments, so I think it’s important that physicians and their patients are well informed about what might come, and what that means for their daily life.”

The team aims to study numerous breast-cancer survivors and figure out which every-day actions no longer come naturally to them. Lang says these can be as simple as reaching up for a mug or doing your hair. Through her research, Lang may have also determined that patients that chose to get breast reconstruction surgery after their treatment might be faring better than their counterparts. “The women in the mastectomy only group, so they only had a mastectomy, no reconstruction, more of them had this shoulder pain that we were looking for, and more of them had this potentially harmful movement pattern that could be causing that. It seems like, perhaps, the breast reconstructions were actually protective for that.”

Lang adds that her team is one of the first groups to launch a study like this. “The lens that we’re taking, of how different surgeries change movements, I think we’re one of the first groups, probably in Canada, definitely in North America, to focus from this perspective.” She says her team will need a group of participants for the study, which it scheduled to start in the coming months, so if there are women out there who have had mastectomies or reconstructions, they are more than welcome to join it. She encourages anyone who is interested to email her at Angelica.Lang@Usask.ca.