Role of radiotherapy in early breast cancer: an overview

Radiotherapy has an established role in reducing the local relapses in breast cancer patients. The objective of this review was to investigate whether radiotherapy or its omission after breast surgery has measurable consequences on local tumor recurrence and patient survival. The late excess of cardiac deaths has also been published in various reports but important advances in the delivery of radiotherapy have overcome this problem to the extent that, excess cardiac deaths do not appear to be occurring in more recent trials. In this article some recent data, suggesting that radiotherapy following mastectomy and/or breast conserving surgery has a beneficial effect on survival is reviewed. Omission of radiotherapy is associated with a large increase in risk of ipsilateral breast tumor recurrence and with a small increase in the risk of patient's mortality.