Perspectives on preoperative systemic treatment and breast conservative surgery: One step forward or two steps back?

Preoperative systemic therapy (PST) has become an accepted treatment not only for locally advanced but also for early stage breast cancer patients. Clinical trials have demonstrated that the use of PST is equally to adjuvant treatments in terms of overall survival, and has the advantage of increasing rates of breast conservative surgery and rates of pathologic complete response, a surrogate endpoint for the effectiveness of systemic therapy. Initial studies have suggested higher rates of locoregional recurrence with this approach. However, the optimization of systemic and targeted therapy and the multidisciplinary care is key to achieving optimal outcomes in this setting.