Internal mammary sentinel node biopsy is feasible without serious additional complications. It improves nodal staging in breast cancer by identifying higher-risk subgroups with internal mammary nodal metastases, which might benefit from altered adjuvant treatment regimens.

No abstract

Trait anxiety rather than the diagnosis breast cancer determined whether patients experienced a low QoL.

Although the internal mammary (IM) lymph node status is a major prognostic factor in breast cancer, IM nodal staging is not common practice. In order to improve nodal staging, we have routinely performed IM sentinel node (SN) biopsy and have adjusted adjuvant treatment accordingly. We reviewed the outcome of these patients. Data from 764 patients were available for follow-up. A total of 406 patients had no lymph node metastases (group 1), 330 patients had axillary metastases (group 2), 7 patients had IM metastases only (group 3) and 21 patients had both axillary and IM metastases (group 4). Mean follow-up was 46 months. Prognosis did not appear to be worse for patients with IM metastases compared to those with axillary metastases only, which might indicate that they benefit from improved staging and tailored adjuvant treatment algorithms. However, long-term follow-up data, preferably in larger series, are needed to support our findings.

In this study, the number of items to be included in the self-administered questionnaire was reduced. The resulting set of items that determines patients' perceptions on quality of breast cancer care is easy to complete and enables anonymous responses. Further research can be aimed at establishing the reliability of the current questionnaire.