[The management of advanced mammary carcinoma]

The authors have elected to use various therapeutical means at the disposal in succession, giving preference to therapeutical scaling over "all azimuth" therapy. The initial overall scheme adopted by them, however, could by no means represent a rational issue in all cases, as long as curative treatment of advanced and metastatic carcinoma of the breast is lacking. Anyway, it is difficult to apply whenever the patient has already been submitted to one or more therapeutics, whether sequential or combined, administered in a sequence that differs from the one proposed. Finally, emphasis was laid on the problem of who is going to take charge of these chronic patients who require sustained surveillance and close moral support. As they go increasing in number, specialized teams are being formed all over the world that have at their disposal consultations and sometimes even care units entirely devoted to the treatment of patients with advanced breast carcinoma. The experience of such units and the shrewdness of cooperative groups will probably enable the own parameters of the disease to be defined with accuracy, and the results of various treatments under well-defined circumstances to be estimated; here lies the only hope of clarifying one of the most important and most painful problems in cancerology.