e-Article
Axillary Recurrence Rate in Breast Cancer Patients with Negative Sentinel Lymph Node Biopsy or Containing Micrometastases and Without Further Lymphadenectomy: A Monocentric Review of 8 Years and 481 Cases.
Document Type
Article
Author
Source
Subject
*BREAST tumor diagnosis
*BIOPSY
*SENTINEL lymph nodes
*ANALYSIS of variance
*AXILLA
*LYMPH nodes
*SURVIVAL analysis (Biometry)
*TUMOR classification
*DISEASE relapse
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Language
ISSN
1075-122X
Abstract
Sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) has almost completely replaced complete axillary lymph node dissection (CALND) as the first-line axillary procedure for clinically node-negative early stage breast cancer. We assessed the incidence of axillary relapse in patients with negative SLNB who had no additional CALND (group 1, n = 481) and in patients whose SLNB contained micrometastases and had no further CALND (group 2, n = 45). All patients were operated on between November 1997 and December 2005 and followed at the Jules Bordet Institute. The median follow-up was 48 months. A mean of 2.2 sentinel lymph nodes was removed per patient. Axillary relapse was observed in only one patient (0.2%) in group 1 and in none of the patients in group 2. This study confirms that the axillary recurrence rate after long-term follow-up of patients with a negative sentinel lymph node is very rare, provided that the selection criteria are judicious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]