Who would have thought it! Influence on outcome of radiotherapy, Ki67 and stroma. Introduction to Session 5

Excerpt

In breast cancer there are clearly a number of factors that counter-intuitively influence outcome or for which there is a change, after a considerable time, in longstanding evidence that outcome was not affected. The latter is well represented by the effect of postoperative radiotherapy in early breast cancer on overall survival. There was clear evidence that such treatment reduced local recurrence risk (by about two-thirds) and risk of death from breast cancer (by one-sixth [1]), but until 1997 evidence suggested treatment would not improve overall survival. The results in that year of two randomised trials in high-risk patients showed that the addition of postmastectomy radiotherapy to adjuvant chemotherapy improved overall survival [2, 3]. …