Will breast cancer recur after breast conservation?

Will breast cancer recur after breast-conserving surgery?

Breast cancer recurrence is a common occurrence in patients with or without breast conservation. For patients who undergo breast-conserving surgery, the main causes of recurrence are multicentric disease or incomplete surgical margins.

If breast cancer recurs locally after breast-conserving surgery, it may have a negative impact on the patient's long-term survival rate. In order to control local recurrence, radiotherapy is usually used as an adjuvant after surgery, and comprehensive treatments such as systemic intravenous chemotherapy and endocrine therapy may be performed as needed. This may cause radiation damage to the patient's skin and have adverse effects on cardiopulmonary function, etc. Although radiotherapy after breast-conserving surgery can reduce the recurrence rate from 20% to 3%-8%, it is still higher than the recurrence rate of local mastectomy.

Not all breast cancer patients are suitable for breast-conserving surgery. For example, breast cancer with extensive lesions or diffuse distribution of malignant calcification foci, or breast cancer that cannot achieve negative margins or ideal appearance; breast cancer patients whose tumors have positive margins after wide local resection and whose pathological margins cannot be guaranteed to be negative after repeated resection; and patients with inflammatory breast cancer are not suitable for breast-conserving surgery.

Given that breast cancer has become one of the most common malignant tumors that threaten women's physical and mental health, it is recommended that women learn how to self-examine their breasts and develop the habit of regular self-examination.