Salvage Treatment After Local Breast Cancer Relapse

Local recurrence after mastectomy as primary treatment of breast cancer has been associated with poor prognosis. In a Swiss study analyzing prospectively the outcome of 225 local recurrences after mastectomy, Brunner et al. [1] observed in 1988 a somewhat better prognosis than generally published, partly as a consequence of a strict search for distant metastases at the time of treatment of the recurrence and as an ineligibility criterion for this study. Under these conditions, disease-free survival was 47% at 5 years. The strongest factors in the multivariate analysis determining disease-free survival were the initial axillary lymph node status and the time elapsed between mastectomy and appearance of the local recurrence.