Hepatic metastases from breast cancer

Abstract

The prognosis of patients with hepatic metastasis from breast cancer treated with systemic or regional chemotherapy is disappointing. When technically feasible, liver resection offers the best results. Eighteen patients out of 22 submitted to laparotomy underwent radical liver resection. Median follow-up from liver resection was 36 months. The median time interval between breast cancer diagnosis and disease recurrence was 35 months. Median disease-free survival and overall survival from liver resection were 66 and 74 months, respectively. Median survival time from breast cancer surgery was 88.5 months. Surgical treatment of liver metastases should be carried out on young and older patients alike when site of metastases is the liver alone. Neoadjuvant treatment and preoperative diagnostic laparoscopy should be planned in future experience.

Repeat Hepatectomy for Breast Cancer Liver Metastases

“…In the past years, several articles, including ours, have been published arguing for the benefit of surgery in study populations varying from 2 to 115 patients, with a 5-year survival rate ranging from 27 to 50 %. [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] Our current survival rates are similar to these previous publications.…”

“…[9][10][11][12] To date, only a few small retrospective series have been reported regarding the resection of BCLM, with a median survival of 30-70 months and 5-year overall survival rates of 33-50 %. [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] At our institution, selected patients with BCLM have routinely undergone surgical resection since 1985, with previously reported promising results. 13 Despite these encouraging results, some patients who underwent hepatectomy with curative intent will experience disease recurrence.…”

Resection of Single Metachronous Liver Metastases from Breast Cancer Stage I-II Yield Excellent Overall and Disease-Free Survival. Single Center Experience and Review of the Literature

“…A literature search was performed on PubMed database using the terms: ‘breast cancer', ‘liver metastases', ‘surgical treatment for breast cancer metastases' identifying 17 studies, published between 2000 and 2014, reporting information concerning surgical resection of BCLM (table 1) [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]. …”

Surgical Indications, Timing, and Strategy in Non-colorectal Liver Metastases

“…Given the prognostic value represented by each metastatic site, the meticulous choice of the liver resection candidate is obvious. In fact, in the studies that show the reference global population, the rate of resection is absolutely modest, around 0.3%, but with a high resection rate, 81%, being the non-resected cases due to intraoperatively carcinomatosis diagnosis [118][119][120].…”

“…In the most recent and representative case studies series, resection of breast cancer liver metastases shows that the appearance of metastases follows the discovery of the primary tumor of an average of 40 months (23-77), the indication for resection concerns cases with single lesion or a maximum of two lesions, with dimensions within 3 cm in most cases, and that in most cases, major resections were performed (more than 3 liver segments) with values of radical resection (negative margin resection) of more than 80% [118][119][120][121][122][123][124][125]. The average survival values reported by these series range from 32 to 74 months and the 5-year follow-up survival rates are of 34-80%.…”