[Conservative management of the axillary nodes in operable breast cancer]

Over the years, the treatment of breast cancer has changed dramatically. We briefly describe those changes and also the different therapeutic approches to the axillary nodes. Over the last century, the primary goal was to avoid radical surgery of the breast. However, during the last decades, the interest was mainly focused on the possibility of treating the axila in a conservative way, in an effort to minimize the adverse effects of linfadenectomy. The sentinel node technique is of key importance, because nowadays it is possible to diagnose breast cancer at early stages when most of the times the axila is negative. The early diagnoses of breast cancer makes the sentinel node technique a relevant tool at the time of making therapeutic decisions. We believe that the sentinel node technique could predict in many cases the lymph node status without the need of a complete axillary dissection of the axila in patients with breast cancer.