[Locoregional breast cancer recurrence. Treatment following exclusively local therapy]

In 58 out of 515 patients with a primary carcinoma of the breast there was local-regional recurrence. Treatment consisted in generous excision and local radiation (50-60 Gy). After a mean observation period of 65.4 +/- 22.2 months, distant metastasization was found to have occurred in 22 patients (37.9%). Of the other 36 patients 23 (39.7%) had suffered no further recurrence at the end of this time, while 13 patients (22.4%) had a new local-regional recurrence. In a retrospective study a variety of parameters of prognosis were investigated in order to determine to their predictive value. It was found that there were significant differences in overall survival rates with tumors of histological differentiation stage I as compared to tumors of differentiation stages II and III (p = 0.003). There were no differences in the recurrence-free interval (p = 0.34). The presence or respectively lack of steroid receptors in the primary tumor made no significant differences to the recurrence-free interval and the survival rates. Those of the patients on whom this study was based whose axillary nodal status was N+ had received (adjuvant) treatment with cytostatics. This resulted in no differences in the recurrence-free interval (p = 0.28) or the overall survival rates (p = 0.3) when the N+ and N- patients were compared. The therapeutic conclusion drawn from these results is that breast carcinoma patients with an exclusively local-regional recurrence should initially receive local treatment only; systemic therapy should be reserved for the generalization stage.