Early follow-up results of our primary breast cancer patients treated with adjuvant chemotheraphy

SUMMARY In this study 216 patients with stage l-IIIA breast cancer who were treated between 1989 - 1996 with adjuvant chemotherapy (CMF, FEC.FAC) were evaluated for 4 year survival analysis in terms of most currently known prognostic factors which are lymph node metastases, number of metastatic lymph nodes, tumor diameter, hormone receptor status, menopausal status, grade, histological subtype, lymphatic and vascular invasion. The presence of lymph node metastasis, the increment in lymph node number (LN + > 4), the positive vascular invasion and increased tumor diameter (in patients treated with MRM) found to be significant in determining prognosis. As the patients who had protective breast surgery and the patients who had CMF chemotherapy were predicted to have good prognosis before determining therapy strategy, in these patient group 48 months DFS was found to be higher when compared to other regimens. When all patients (Stage l-IIIA) were evaluated in general OS was 13.1% in 64 months and DFS was 16.1% in 57 months. These values were lower when compared with similar groups in the literature. This was due to the fact that most of the patients treated with adjuvant chemotherapy had adverse prognostic factors (premenopausal, lymph node metastasis, metastatic lymph nodes ?4, tumor diameter ?3 cm, ER negativity and tumor type such as invasive ductal carcinoma) and conventional dose chemotherapy was inadequate for this therapy group. 69