Results in patients with breast cancer treated by radical mastectomy and postoperative irradiation with no adjuvant chemotherapy

Abstract

In 1963 an electron beam became available, making irradiation of the chest wall technically easy. In addition to peripheral lymphatic irradiation in patients with positive axillary nodes and/or the tumor in the inner quadrants or centrally located, patients with tumor larger than 5 cm or with grave signs and/or a significant incidence of positive axillary nodes received chest wall irradiation. None of the patients has received elective chemotherapy. Disease‐free survival rates at ten years are 54% for the overall group, 79% for the patients with negative nodes, 44% for patients with positive nodes, 61% for patients with 1–3 positive nodes, and 33% for patients with four or more positive nodes. The incidence of peripheral lymphatic failures is low as well as the incidence of failures on the chest wall in the patients having had chest wall irradiation. With the availability of electron beam and adjustments in doses, complications are nonexistent. The incidence of treatment failures, local‐regional, or distant, that have appeared by ten years are compared with the incidence of failures that were experienced by the placebo patients in the clinical trial of the NSABP of thio‐TEPA versus placebo. The clearly lesser incidence of treatment failures in the U.T.M.D. Anderson Hospital patients either suggests that postoperative irradiation may have survival benefits or that the data of the NSABP series are not representative of all series.