Most patients with mid-stage breast cancer can achieve excellent outcomes with a combination of surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and endocrine therapy, with five-year survival rates of essentially 50-60%, and some patients can even survive long-term.
Breast cancer is a very common malignancy in women in China, with roughly 1.2 million new breast cancer cases and 500,000 deaths from breast cancer and its complications worldwide each year.
Mid-stage breast cancer is still very promising for surgical cure. Radical breast cancer surgery, combined with post-operative radiotherapy and chemotherapy, as well as endocrine therapy and targeted drug therapy, allows breast cancer patients to survive for a relatively long time. For example, if there is no recurrence for more than five years after surgery, it can be considered as a clinical cure. However, the exact length of survival cannot be determined because each breast cancer patient’s specific situation is different, and factors such as the patient’s age, whether there are distant metastases, metastatic sites, as well as sensitivity to treatment, tumor load, molecular typing, etc. will all affect the survival of breast cancer patients. Some patients with intermediate breast cancer have good treatment outcomes. However, there are also some whose disease is not well controlled after treatment. When multiple distant metastases appear in the advanced stage of breast cancer, there is no too good treatment, so they can only look at the side of treatment. In addition, there is also a relationship with the pathological stage of breast cancer, as well as immunohistochemistry results. If the breast cancer is triple negative breast cancer, it is easy to have distant metastasis at early stage, the treatment effect is not ideal and the patient’s survival time is short. If it is a HER2-positive breast cancer that can be treated with targeted therapy, the treatment is better, but it also depends on what the condition is when it starts to be detected, which is also a major factor in determining the prognosis.