NEW YORK, Dec. 12 (Xinhua) -- Some women with the earliest stages of breast cancer could be carefully monitored, undergoing surgery and radiation only if the disease advances, new data suggested.

"The strategy is akin to one already used in early prostate cancer, as doctors are increasingly looking at whether they can pull back on some cancer therapies, to spare patients side effects and costs," reported The Wall Street Journal on Thursday on the development.

"This is really the first study to confirm our suspicions that there's a subset of low-risk patients that could do just as well without surgery," said Nancy Chan, a breast-cancer specialist at NYU Langone's Perlmutter Cancer Center, who wasn't involved in the study. "It's really encouraging."

Some doctors said there wasn't enough long-term data to prove that the practice is safe. How aggressively to treat this form of early-stage cancer -- and whether to call it cancer at all -- is controversial.

Some 300,000 women in the United States are diagnosed with invasive breast cancer each year. But an additional 50,000 are diagnosed with "stage zero" breast cancer, also called ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS, which occurs when there are cancer cells in a woman's milk duct but not in her breast tissue. The disease itself poses little risk but can turn into the more dangerous, invasive cancer. Enditem

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