Purpose: The purpose of this retrospective single-center study was to examine histopathological characteristics and treatment options in a cohort of Greek female patients treated with breast conserving surgery (BCS) and to evaluate potential predictive factors of breast cancer (BC) local recurrence.
Methods: The clinic's medical records from 1995 up to the end of July 2016 were scanned in order to identify female patients treated with BCS. We recognized 1175 patients who underwent BCS, representing 35.8% of the entire sample (3281 patients).
Results: The mean age of the patients enrolled in this study was 54.7 years, with a median follow-up period of 58.5 months. Nine deaths (0.8%) were registered with 5-year overall survival (OS) rate being 100%. Regarding adjuvant therapies, radiotherapy (RT) was assigned to 94.4% of the patients, endocrine therapy to 86.0%, chemotherapy to 51.3%, while all therapies were given simultaneously to 38.3% of the sample patients. Herceptin was administered to 14.1% of the patients. Twenty-eight recurrences (2.4%) with 3 deaths (10.7%) were confirmed. Over all traditional parameters studied, only lymph node status appeared to be statistically correlated with local recurrence (p=0.005). T3 stage can be considered as a hint that this tumor size might be a risk factor of local recurrence. Age at diagnosis seems to be an independent factor of BC local recurrence.
Conclusions: A very low rate of local recurrence (2.4%) was validated which can be attributed to patients being appropriately selected for BCS, who were then enrolled in this study, and to the uniformity of the RT plan.