Center Profile: Helen Krontiras, M.D.

Web Extra! Hear Dr. Krontiras discuss the rewards of developing patient relationships.

Incredible strides are being made in the fields of breast cancer research and treatment, and Helen Krontiras, M.D., is at the forefront of both. Crossroads salutes the assistant professor of surgery at the School of Medicine and
medical director of the UAB Interdisciplinary Breast Center, who has helped hundreds of women through diagnosis and treatment. As co-director of the Breast Cancer Prevention and Risk Assessment Clinic and an associate scientist
in UAB’s Comprehensive Cancer Center and Minority Health and Research Center, Dr. Krontiras has also made major contributions to cancer research and helped educate women about the risk factors associated with the disease.

Moving from New Jersey to Birmingham at the age of five could have been a daunting culture shock for Helen Krontiras, M.D., the daughter of Greek and Italian immigrants who came to the United States when they were teenagers. But Dr. Krontiras and her family were pleasantly surprised to find a welcoming community, as well as a fairly large population from Mediterranean lands.
One member of that group was a Lebanese man named Nabeel who ran a small store on Oxmoor Road in Homewood. “It started out as just a small room where they sold Greek cheeses and cold cuts, and that’s where we used to get our feta cheese,” Dr. Krontiras remembers with a smile. “I went to grade school at Our Lady of Sorrows, which is right next door, and we used to go to Nabeel’s to get gum and candy after school.”
In the early 1990s, when Nabeel retired, the Krontiras family bought the shop and expanded it into an imported-foods market and a sit-down restaurant. Today Nabeel’s has become something of a Birmingham institution.

A Natural Progression
While her family has become known for its cuisine, Dr. Krontiras has made a name for herself in the medical field as a breast cancer specialist at UAB.

Dr. Krontiras says she had been interested in becoming a doctor at a very young age. During her sophomore year at Birmingham-Southern College, she participated in a pre-health internship that allowed her to spend a month shadowing her aunt, an operating-room nurse in New Jersey.

“I really caught the fever of the operating room, so I knew I wanted to be a surgeon of some sort,” Dr. Krontiras says. “So then I went to medical school at UAB and got into a surgery residency, and during that residency I was always fascinated with cancer treatment. It was just a natural progression for me to focus on breast cancer surgery—surgeons can do a lot for the treatment of breast cancer, most patients do well, and I enjoy taking care of women.” Later she completed a fellowship at Northwestern University before returning to Birmingham and UAB, where she joined the faculty in 2001.

Dr. Krontiras says she enjoys the interdisciplinary aspects of being a surgeon at UAB. “We work closely with medical oncologists and radiation oncologists,” she explains. “Although our patients’ presentations may be similar, each patient has unique characteristics and needs to be treated in a slightly different way. And that’s why we need the group—to come up with a treatment plan that’s tailored specifically to each patient.

“Our interdisciplinary breast cancer clinic was one of the prototype clinics in which the three physicians are actually there together, seeing the patients at the same time. So the patient can come in, see all three physicians, and leave with opinions from all three without having to go back and forth for different visits. And everybody is on the same page with the recommended treatment plan.”

Breakthroughs and Bonding
Dr. Krontiras is also involved in clinical research, having “restarted” UAB’s Breast Cancer Prevention and Risk Assessment Clinic. With the help of the Division of Gynecologic Oncology and the Lynne Cohen Foundation, the clinic recently acquired funding to begin a number of research projects related to prevention and risk assessment; through UAB’s breast-cancer SPORE (Specialized Program of Research Excellence), Dr. Krontiras also has been working with UAB chemistry professor and Cancer Center senior scientist Don Muccio, Ph.D., to investigate novel rexinoids that might help decrease the incidence of breast cancer.

Away from the operating room and the clinic, Dr. Krontiras and her husband are raising a daughter, Alina, whom they adopted from Russia last March. “I took a few months off work for the bonding process and to help myself learn how to be the mother of a two-year-old, and it’s been a wonderful experience,” she says. “We hope to maybe do it again—we may start the process again this year.”

With so much time taken up being a physician and a mother, Dr. Krontiras says she finds herself returning to the family business at Nabeel’s quite often—“That’s our fallback place,” she says with a laugh. “When it’s my night to cook, that’s when I go over there and pick up some take-out. It’s comfort food for me."