Princess Kate is undergoing a course of preventive treatment after being diagnosed with cancer. Kate's medical team thought her condition was benign at the time, but additional tests showed that she had cancer. At face value, it sounds like a treatment that will prevent the growth of cancer, but it's more complex than that, and it doesn't apply to healthy people who are not considered high risk for developing the disease. Chemotherapy is a drug treatment that stops or slows the growth of cancer cells. Kate was treated with preventative chemotherapy, also known as adjuvant therapy, in which doctors sometimes recommend killing cancer cells that can't be detected and might not have been destroyed during the first round of treatment. Adjuvant therapy removes signals in the body that encourage a specific type of cancer to grow. This type of follow-up treatment is usually used to improve the quality of life in people with colon, breast and lung cancer, but it is being studied to treat other types as well. It depends on the type of cancer, the stage of the cancer, and the health status of the person who has it.
Chemo is not currently used to prevent cancer in people who are not high risk or have not been diagnosed with and treated for the disease. A range of lifestyle changes, such as stopping smoking and limiting alcohol consumption, can lower a person's chance of developing cancer. If you are considered to be high risk for breast cancer, you should consider having a prophylactic mastectomy, which is the removal of one or both breasts. People with a family history of cancer or a pre-cancerous condition, as well as people with a high risk of developing cancer in the future, are often recommended for chloroprevention. Chemoprevention is the use of drugs or other substances to help lower a person's risk of developing cancer in the first place or keep it from recurring. According to the National Cancer Institute, some drugs can reduce the risk of breast cancer in high risk women. The National Cancer Institute says that aspirin doesn't prevent cancer, but it may prevent colorectal cancer in some people.