Breast carcinoma: treatment failures in "early" and "late" disease

Review of 86 autopsied cases of disseminated breast carcinoma showed that the scatter in survival time and pattern of metastatic distribution was similar in those with and without node involvement at operation. There were tumour cells in the efferent vessels in 86% of cases with tumour-bearing nodes, this factor being thus associated with a "late" carcinoma, one in which latent metastatic spread was present at the time of operation. While one cannot distinguish between an "early" tumour confined to the breast, and a potential treatment failure in which tumour emboli may have passed the nodes without colonizing them, the present findings indicate that such a distinction may be real.