Outcomes of Breast-Conserving Therapy in Patients With Inflammatory Breast Cancer: A Meta-Analysis

Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer. Currently, patients who respond to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) are treated with mastectomy and axillary lymph node dissection. This study aimed to synthesize real-world data to evaluate the feasibility of breast-conserving therapy (BCT), sentinel lymph node (SLN), and sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) for patients with IBC who respond to NAC.

PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Library databases were searched for relevant articles. Clinical studies that compared mastectomy with BCT for IBC treatment were reviewed. The primary outcomes were local recurrence rate and 5-y survival rate in patients with IBC who responded to NAC. Furthermore, the SLN detection rate and false-negative rate (FNR) for SLNB were also evaluated.

In the final analysis, 17 studies were included. The pooled estimates of the local recurrence rate for mastectomy and no surgical intervention were 18.6% and 15.9%, respectively (P = 0.956). Five-y survival was similar for mastectomy, partial mastectomy, and no surgical intervention (45.8%, 57.1%, and 39.4%, respectively). The pooled estimates of the SLN detection rate and FNR for SLNB were 81.9% and 21.8%, respectively.

Among patients with IBC who respond to NAC, the local recurrence and 5-y survival rates in those undergoing BCT are noninferior to the rates in those undergoing mastectomy; therefore, BCT could be a feasible option for surgical management. However, a poor SLN detection rate and a high FNR were found in patients undergoing SLNB. Further large-scale clinical studies are required to confirm our findings.