[A plea for the conservative treatment of breast cancer]

This article is a plea for the implementation of early-stage breast cancer conservative therapy into as many surgical clinics as possible. The aforementioned statement relies mainly on published papers and data (the protocol included) provided to us by Instituti Clinici di Perfezionamento di Milano experts in breast cancer conservative therapy and to a lesser extent on our not too numerous results (30 cases) obtained over the past 2 years since we applied the Milano protocol on a regular basis. Thus we support the view that the breast-conserving treatment is suitable for clinical stage I or II carcinoma whose tumors are 3 cm or less in greatest diameter, provided axillary lymphadenectomy is associated for prognostic and future management guidance reasons, but not for cure. Breast-limited postoperative radiation treatment is foremost aimed at local recurrences rate reduction without significantly influencing survival rate. Postoperative chemotherapy, indicated for node-positive patients and/or primary tumors over 1 cm in greatest, diameter, has been proved to contribute to long-term survival rate. However, both the small sample size and the short period of observation of our study prevented us from drawing firm conclusions directly.