Breast cancer is the most common cause of cancer-related death among women worldwide, with case fatality rates highest in low-resource countries. Despite significant scientific advances in its management, most of the world faces resource constraints that limit the capacity to improve early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease. The Breast Health Global Initiative (BHGI) strives to develop evidence-based, economically feasible, and culturally appropriate guidelines that can be used in nations with limited health care resources to improve breast cancer outcomes. Using an evidence-based consensus panel process, four BHGI expert panels addressed the areas of early detection and access to care, diagnosis and pathology, treatment and resource allocation, and health care systems and public policy as they relate to breast health care in limited-resource settings. To update and expand on the BHGI Guidelines published in 2003, the 2005 BHGI panels outlined a stepwise, systematic approach to health care improvement using a tiered system of resource allotment into four levels-basic, limited, enhanced, and maximal-based on the contribution of each resource toward improving clinical outcomes. Early breast cancer detection improves outcome in a cost-effective fashion assuming treatment is available, but requires public education to foster active patient participation in diagnosis and treatment. Clinical breast examination combined with diagnostic breast imaging (ultrasound +/- diagnostic mammography) can facilitate cost-effective tissue sampling techniques for cytologic or histologic diagnosis. Breast-conserving treatment with partial mastectomy and radiation therapy requires more health care resources and infrastructure than mastectomy, but can be provided in a thoughtfully designed limited-resource setting. The availability and administration of systemic therapies are critical to improving breast cancer survival. Estrogen receptor testing allows patient selection for hormonal treatments (tamoxifen, oophorectomy). Chemotherapy, which requires some allocation of resources and infrastructure, is needed to treat node-positive, locally advanced breast cancers, which represent the most common clinical presentation of disease in low-resource countries. When chemotherapy is not available, patients with locally advanced, hormone receptor-negative cancers can only receive palliative therapy. Future research is needed to better determine how these guidelines can best be implemented in limited-resource settings.

Background and Objective. The sentinel node hypothesis assumes that a primary tumor drains to a specific lymph node in the regional lymphatic basin. To determine whether the sentinel node is indeed the node most likely to harbor an axillary metastasis from breast carcinoma, the authors used cytokeratin immunohistochemical staining (IHC) to examine both sentinel and nonsentinel lymph nodes. Methods. From February 1994 through October 1995, patients with breast cancer were staged with sentinel lymphadenectomy followed by completion level I and II axillary dissection. If the sentinel node was free of metastasis by hematoxylin and eosin staining (H&E), then sentinel and nonsentinel nodes were examined with IHC. Results. The 103 patients had a median age of 55 years and a median tumor size of 1.8 cm (58.3% T1, 39.8% T2, and 1.9% T3). A mean of 2 sentinel (range, 1–8) and 18.9 nonsentinel (range, 7–37) nodes were excised per patient. The H&E identified 33 patients (32%) with a sentinel lymph node metastasis and 70 patients (68%) with tumor‐free sentinel nodes. Applying IHC to the 157 tumor‐free sentinel nodes in these 70 patients showed an additional 10 tumor‐involved nodes, each in a different patient. Thus, 10 (14.3%) of 70 patients who were tumor‐free by H&E actually were sentinel node‐positive, and the IHC lymph node conversion rate from sentinel node‐negative to sentinel node‐positive was 6.4% (10/157). Overall, sentinel node metastases were detected in 43 (41.8%) of 103 patients. In the 60 patients whose sentinel nodes were metastasis‐free by H&E and IHC, 1087 nonsentinel nodes were examined at 2 levels by IHC and only 1 additional tumor‐positive lymph node was identified. Therefore, one H&E sentinel node‐negative patient (1.7%) was actually node‐positive (p < 0.0001), and the nonsentinel IHC lymph node conversion rate was 0.09% (1/1087; p < 0.001). Conclusions. If the sentinel node is tumor‐free by both H&E and IHC, then the probability of nonsentinel node involvement is <0.1%. The true false‐negative rate of this technique using multiple sections and IHC to examine all nonsentinel nodes for metastasis is 0.97% (1/103) in the authors' hands. The sentinel lymph node is indeed the most likely axillary node to harbor metastatic breast carcinoma.

Background. Axillary lymph‐node dissection is an important staging procedure in the surgical treatment of breast cancer. However, early diagnosis has led to increasing numbers of dissections in which axillary nodes are free of disease. This raises first, questions about the need for the procedure. We carried out a study to assess, first, whether a single axillary lymph node (sentinel node) initially receives malignant cells from a breast carcinoma and, second, whether a clear sentinel node reliably forecasts a disease‐free axilla. Methods. In a consecutive series of 163 women with operable breast carcinoma, we injected microcolloidal particles of human serum albumin labelled with technetium‐99m. This tracer was injected subdermally, close to the tumor site, on the day before surgery, and scintigraphic images of the axilla and breast were taken 10 min, 30 min, and 3 h later. A mark was placed on the skin over the site of the radioactive node (sentinel node). During breast surgery, a hand‐held γ‐ray det$ector probe was used to locate the sentinel node, and make possible its separate removal via a small axillary incision. Complete axillary lymphadenectomy was then done. The sentinel node was tagged separately from other nodes. Permanent sections of all removed nodes were prepared for pathological examination. Findings. From the sentinel node, we could accurately predict axillary lymph‐node status in 156 (97.5%) of the 160 patients in whom a sentinel node was identified, and in all cases (45 patients) with tumours less than 1.5 cm in diameter. In 32 (38%) of the 85 cases with metastatic axillary nodes, the only positive node was the sentinel node. Interpretation. In the large majority of patients with breast cancer, lymphoscintigraphy and γ‐probe‐guided surgery can be used to locate the sentinel node in the axilla, and thereby provide important information about the status of axillary nodes. Patients without clinical involvement of the axilla should undergo sentinel‐node biopsy routinely, and may be spared complete axillary dissection when the sentinel node is disease‐free.

The application of fine-needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) to the diagnosis of nonpalpable breast lesions was evaluated with a new method which uses standard needle localization under mammographic guidance to assure accurate sampling by FNAB. This method was prospectively applied to 100 mammographically detected breast lesions in 100 women (mean age, 53 years). All 100 patients underwent surgical excision of these nonpalpable lesions after cytologic aspiration. Sufficient aspirated material was obtained for cytologic diagnosis from 91 patients (91%). The histologic and cytologic interpretations were then compared. Twenty malignancies were ultimately diagnosed by histology (12 invasive ductal carcinoma, six ductal carcinoma in situ, and two lobular carcinoma in situ), of which 17 had been cytologically diagnosed. There were no false-positive diagnoses of malignancy by FNAB. False-negative readings (3.3%) included two cases of lobular carcinoma in situ and one case of ductal carcinoma in situ. This technique thus demonstrated a sensitivity of 85%, specificity of 100%. and overall diagnostic accuracy of 96.7% for the nonsurgical detection of malignancy in nonpalpable breast lesions. These results suggest that the established safety, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of FNAB can be maintained in this clinical setting. This procedure may obviate the need for open surgical biopsy in those patients with an unequivocal diagnosis of malignancy. It can also be done using standard techniques and equipment available in many community hospitals. Cancer 66:1480-1487,1990. HE ROLE OF MAMMOGRAPHY as an effective meansT of early detection of breast cancer is well established.'-4 Needle localization of occult tumors under mammographic guidance has become the principle method of sampling nonpalpable breast lesions. This technique is accurate, cost-effective, and relatively safe with reported yields of malignancy varying from 5% to 42%.5-7 On the other hand, fine-needle aspiration biopsy From the