Breast cancer (Breast Carcinoma BC) is one of the major malignant tumors that endanger women’s health. It has also become the first place of female malignant tumor incidence in some major cities in China, which is a serious threat to women’s health. From the ancient fire-burning primitive surgery to the radical surgery of breast cancer proposed by Halsted in 1894, to the later expanded radical surgery and modified radical surgery. It has been found that the larger the surgery, the better the treatment effect of breast cancer. On the contrary, the extensive resection surgery seriously affects the quality of life of patients after surgery. Pengwei Lu, Breast Surgery Department, First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University
As the biological characteristics of breast cancer are recognized, the concept of comprehensive treatment is accepted and the scope of surgical resection is gradually reduced. Several large-scale, multicenter, prospective clinical trials with long-term follow-up results have been published, confirming that breast-conserving treatment and modified radical surgery can achieve the same recurrence-free survival and overall survival rates, and the replacement of axillary dissection with sentinel lymph node biopsy has been proven to be safe. Complications such as upper extremity edema, pain, and mobility problems associated with axillary dissection are expected to be avoided by preserving the axilla.
Sentinel Lymph Node (SLN) is the first or first station lymph node through which the lymph nodes in the area of primary tumor drainage must metastasize, and thus further metastasize to distant lymph nodes. If there is no metastasis in the sentinel lymph node, theoretically no metastasis will occur in other lymph nodes in the primary tumor area. This means that if there is no metastasis in the anterior lymph nodes, the breast cancer can be preserved in the axilla.
Therefore, most patients with early stage breast cancer can choose the surgical option of preserving the breast, and some patients with no metastasis in the axilla are offered the axillary staging approach to avoid axillary clearance. Since 2001, the Second Department of Breast Surgery in our hospital has been carrying out breast-conserving surgery for breast cancer, and in 2005, we started to conduct clinical validation studies on sentinel lymph node biopsy for early breast cancer, and in 2008, we started to apply sentinel lymph node biopsy routinely to the clinic for the first time in the province. Practice has confirmed that the prognosis of breast-conserving surgery in our department is the same as the survival rate of simultaneous mastectomy, and the false-negative rate of sentinel lymph nodes is lower than that reported in domestic and foreign literature.
Breast-conserving surgery gives patients confidence! Preserving the axilla gives the patient a higher quality of survival!