Limiting breast cancer lymph node removal

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Feb. 8 (UPI) -- Limiting lymph node removal for certain breast cancers does not appear to result in poorer survival, U.S. researchers found.

Dr. Armando E. Giuliano of the John Wayne Cancer Institute at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif., and colleagues say axillary lymph node dissection has been part of breast cancer surgery since the use of radical mastectomy -- breast removal.

Giuliano says the trial was conducted at 115 sites and enrolled patients from May 1999 to December 2004. Patients were women with early stage tumor invasive breast cancer, no enlarged lymph nodes and one or two sentinel lymph nodes containing metastases -- cancer spread. The study involved 891 patients; 445 were randomly assigned to the axillary lymph node dissection group and 446 to the sentinel lymph node dissection-alone group.

The use of sentinel lymph node dissection alone compared with axillary lymph node dissection did not appear to result in statistically inferior survival, with the five-year overall survival rates being 92.5 percent in the sentinel lymph node dissection-alone group and 91.8 percent in the axillary lymph node dissection group.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found five-year disease-free survival was 83.9 percent for the sentinel lymph node dissection-alone group and 82.2 percent for the axillary lymph node dissection group.