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editorial |
Sentinel lymph node biopsy for staging early breast cancer: minimizing the trade-off by maximizing the accuracy
MGH Surgery, Boston, MA, USA
* (E-mail: MGADD@Partners.org)
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Today sentinel lymph node biopsy (SNB) is considered standard practice for staging the axilla in patients with clinically node-negative disease. A SNB spares 
70% of early-stage breast cancer patients from having a full axillary dissection (ALND), while providing the staging information needed to make adjuvant therapy recommendations. There have been >60 observational trials and several randomized trials demonstrating the safety and accuracy of this technique compared with ALND [1–4]. A randomized trial published in this month's journal by Canavese et al. [5], from the National Institute of Cancer in Genova, Italy, further supports this concept. The authors report that after 5-year median follow-up, the risk of axillary relapse in a node-negative patient after SNB is comparable to axillary recurrence following an ALND. These results like those of other trials with follow-up ranging from 18–46 months support replacing ALND with SNB. While encouraging, the results