Effect of the Surgery Type, Mastectomy vs. Breast Conserving Surgery, on Outcomes of Patients With Locally Advanced Breast Cancer Receiving Neoadjuvant Therapy

Breast cancer is the most prevalent site-specific cancer and one of the most frequent causes of cancer death in women worldwide. Neoadjuvant chemotherapy, along with surgical treatment—breast conserving surgery (BCS) or mastectomy—is an important part of treatment for locally advanced breast cancer. As BCS is preferred to mastectomy in terms of cosmetic, quality-of-life, and functional outcomes, it would be the preferred treatment for locally advanced breast cancer (LABC), if its oncological safety is confirmed.
In this study, we retrospectively compared the oncologic outcomes of post-neoadjuvant chemotherapy BCS with mastectomy in 202 patients with LABC.
There were no significant differences between BCS and mastectomy regarding overall survival, local recurrence, contralateral breast cancer, and distant metastasis.
Our study showed that post-neoadjuvant chemotherapy BCS is an oncologically safe surgical treatment in LABC and that BCS can be considered as an acceptable treatment in selected patients with LABC.