Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Impact of Pathological Characteristics on Local Relapse After Breast-Conserving Therapy: A Subgroup Analysis of the EORTC Boost Versus No Boost Trial [Breast Cancer]

JCO this week: Presented two ASTROs ago, a reanalysis of the EORTC boost trial is now published using centralized path review.

Perhaps one of the interesting conclusions was that margin status did not influence local control. Does this mean that we should not re-excise women that have positive margins, and proceed directly to radiotherapy? One must remember that the entry criteria to this trial was negative margins, therefore all of the positive margins discovered on central path review were presumably missed on the initial interpretation. One might also then assume that these are therefore relatively small regions of margin positivity, and thus very different from patients with known positive margins up front. This should be taken into account when interpreting the results.

Link and Abstract:

Impact of Pathological Characteristics on Local Relapse After Breast-Conserving Therapy: A Subgroup Analysis of the EORTC Boost Versus No Boost Trial [Breast Cancer]: "Purpose

To investigate the long-term impact of pathologic characteristics and an extra boost dose of 16 Gy on local relapse, for stage I and II invasive breast cancer patients treated with breast conserving therapy (BCT).


Patients and Methods

In the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer boost versus no boost trial, after whole breast irradiation, patients with microscopically complete excision of invasive tumor, were randomly assigned to receive or not an extra boost dose of 16 Gy. For a subset of 1,616 patients central pathology review was performed.


Results

The 10-year cumulative risk of local breast cancer relapse as a first event was not significantly influenced if the margin was scored negative, close or positive for invasive tumor or ductal carcinoma in situ according to central pathology review (log-rank P = .45 and P = .57, respectively). In multivariate analysis, high-grade invasive ductal carcinoma was associated with an increased risk of local relapse (P = .026; hazard ratio [HR], 1.67), as was age younger than 50 years (P < .0001; HR, 2.38). The boost dose of 16 Gy significantly reduced the local relapse rate (P = .0006; HR, 0.47). For patients younger than 50 years old and in patients with high grade invasive ductal carcinoma, the boost dose reduced the local relapse from 19.4% to 11.4% (P = .0046; HR, 0.51) and from 18.9% to 8.6% (P = .01; HR, 0.42), respectively.


Conclusion

Young age and high-grade invasive ductal cancer were the most important risk factors for local relapse, while margin status had no significant influence. A boost dose of 16 Gy significantly reduced the negative effects of both young age and high-grade invasive cancer.

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