I attended a one-day conference on metastatic breast cancer in Baltimore given by the Metastatic Breast Cancer Network at Johns Hopkins Hospital with hospital staff.
MBCN has been slowly posting videos of the presentations to it's website. Unfortunately, they haven't uploaded all of them yet. Here's the link to conference information (with a link to the agenda and already posted videos).
http://mbcn.org/special-events/categ...conference-md/
Interestingly, Johns Hopkins surgeon Kenso Hirose (seen at the podium in one of the pics) spoke about surgical solutions to limited metastatic disease, or otherwise oliogometastatic disease. His presentation and that of Stephen Baylin on cutting edge research were excellent, but the videos of their talks are still missing.
Besides the conference, here's an excellent overview of the literature on the statistics of local procedures for oligometastatic tumors. The article has other very interesting information:
http://www.nature.com/nrclinonc/jour...011.44.html#t1
Please know that I believe a cure for metastatic bc will come from a systemic approach and that I don't advocate willy nilly slicing and dicing of mets. However, I do feel that local procedures are an important option for mets survivors, under specific circumstances, and the these procedures may in select cases help to fend off metastatic disease until such time as we have a cure.
I'm due for follow-up scans in December. A brain MRI and CT scans of the chest, abdomen, and pelvis, and having the usual pre-scan anxiety. It's been four months since my last brain scan and 6 months since my last CT scans.
Joan
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