Tactics of combined/complex treatment of breast cancer patients with isolated metastatic lesion of supraclavicular or parasternal lymph nodes

Abstract

The article presents data on 134 breast cancer patients who were diagnosed with lesions of the parasternal, supraclavicular, subclavian and axillary lymph nodes. The effectiveness of surgical or radiation exposure to the supraclavicular/parasternal lymph nodes in their metastatic lesion was analyzed. The survival assessment showed that after 1 year of follow-up, the values of the indicator were almost the same, amounting to 96.3 and 96.4 %, respectively, in groups 1A (surgical treatment) and 1B (radiation therapy). After 3 years, the indicator value was slightly higher in subgroup 1B – 80.4 %, while in group 1A it was 77.8 %, 5-year survival in group 1A was at the level of 33.3 %, in group 1B the indicator value was higher and amounted to 44.6 %, in group 2–78.4 %. At the same time, there were no statistically significant differences in all the terms of the study. We believe that the results of our study are fully consistent with the current trend in the treatment of breast cancer, which can be defined by the phrase ‘the less surgery, the better’. According to our data, surgical removal of metastatically altered supraclavicular and parasternal lymph nodes is inferior to radiation therapy when comparing 5-year overall survival.