Breast cancer, like many other cancers, often follows a tortuous course marked by remissions and subsequent recurrences and, its disease free interval is of varying duration.
The are several clinical factors which might be associated with recurrence of breast cancer such as tumor size, axillary lymph node involvement, histologic type, patient age and selected treatment modalities. But it is not yet settled that a
certain
factor closely related with recurrence among those prognostic factors.
For this reason, we had carried out this clinical study for the purpose of knowing such factors during the period from March of 1990 to February of 1993 at department of Surgery, College of Medicine, Chungnam National University.
50 cases out of 141 breast cancer patients who had received the breast conservation surgery were elected for this study.
By the time of follow-up, recurrence had occurred of 7 of those 50 patients, for an incidence of 14%. The sites of vast majority of locoregional recurrence at the time of discovery were interpectoral nodes and remnant breast. The supraclavicular
nodes,
contralateral breast and skin of forearm were the sites of systemic recurrence. The most common symptoms of reccurence at the time of discovery was the palpable mass, and the others were erythematous skin change on forearm. But, in one case,
there
was
not any symptoms except that a certain recurrence had been suspected on mammographic finding.
The tumor size lesser than 2 cm(T1) had a recurrence rate of 8.3%, compared with 13.6% for those larger than 2 cm(T2). The rateof recurrece for N0, N1 and N2 were 10.3%, 13.3% and 33.3%, respectively. The recurrence rate according to treatment
modalities were 7.7% in surgery with chemotherapy group, 20% in combination of surgery, chemotherapy and Tamoxifen, 14.3% in combination of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. But, there was not noted any recurrence in patients with
combination
of
surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and Tamoxifen.
The disease free intervals were more shorter in larger tumor size, more involvement of axillary lymph nodes, and in the invasize lobular carcinoma on histopathology. But, the interval was not related with the patient's age and the radiotherapy.
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