Sarah A. McLaughlin, M.D.

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SUMMARY

The research of Sarah A. McLaughlin, M.D., focuses on lymphedema and issues of survivorship affecting women treated for breast cancer. Over the past 16 years, Dr. McLaughlin has developed an ongoing prospective registry of patients who had axillary surgery for breast cancer. She collects clinical and pathological data and quality of life data at baseline and follow-up. This is a novel dataset.

Dr. McLaughlin is the principal investigator for a long-term study evaluating lymphangiogenesis to better predict lymphedema. She has a history of extramural funding.

Focus areas

• Predict and prevent lymphedema.
  • Assess and quantify the impact of lymphedema risk on a patient's quality of life.
  • Identify biomarkers that may predict the risk of lymphedema.
  • Develop tailored intervention lymphedema prediction and treatment strategies.
  • Maintain a novel, comprehensive, annotated tissue bank supporting these translation questions.

Significance to patient care

How often lymphedema occurs after breast cancer treatment isn't known. But many women who have a sentinel node biopsy and even more women who have axillary node dissection for breast cancer worry about their risk of developing lymphedema. Dr. McLaughlin's team hypothesizes that this anxiety stems from patients not being able to correctly predict their personal risk of developing lymphedema. This negatively affects overall quality of life. If clinicians could correctly identify patients as having low risk or high risk and offer personalized treatments to lessen that risk, many patients would be less anxious.