Secondary Edematous Breast Cancer: When to Be Operated on Background of Neo-Adjuvant Chemotherapy?

Abstract

Current methods of diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer patients should be closely linked to the advances in molecular biology The ways of increasing the effectiveness of combined treatment of the patients with secondary−edema of breast cancer, namely the tactics of personalized treatment on the basis of evaluation of molecular−biological tumor markers and the data of magnetic resonance imaging have been presented in this paper. Here it has been emphasized that the proposed method of assessing the prevalence of the tumor process in the patients with secondary edematous breast cancer allowed the determination of the tumor size and edema, as well as to optimization of the treatment protocols. This research was performed in 54 patients aged of 37−75 years and these patients comprised the main group. All of them underwent the sessions of neoadjuvant polychemotherapy, surgical treatment, remote radiotherapy in the presence of affected lymph nodes in terms of sequential comprehensive treatment. The immediate results of the effectiveness of combined treatment were evaluated by one− and two−year overall and relapse−ree survival of the patients with secondary edematous breast cancer. The findings (follow−up period of 1−2 years) have indicated that the personalized treatment of patients with secondary−edema of breast cancer depending on the molecular−biological marker clusters with determination of the degree of aggressiveness and choice of treatment tactics is a highly effective method. Owing to the use of the personalized treatment, a complete or partial regression was achieved by more than by 30 % in 83.3 % of patients in the main group versus 50 % of the control, that jointly with the data on therapeutic pathomorphosis confirms the effectiveness of this method. Key words: secondary edematous breast cancer, molecular biological markers, pathomorphosis.