A Short Report. Radiotherapy Treats a Greater Volume than Surgery Using an Axillary Sentinel Node Model

Abstract

Radiotherapy and surgery are local treatments and can be compared in randomized trails. Recent examples have compared axillary radiotherapy to completion lymphadectomy surgery for sentinel lymph node positive breast cancer and have shown radiotherapy was non-inferior in terms of regional control, but was also significantly less morbid. A superficial reading of these studies may miss an important consideration, the volume of the axilla actually being treated by the different modalities. We conducted this study to compare the difference in planned axillary treatment volumes undergoing axillary lymph node dissection as compared to axillary radiotherapy.

Keywords

• Breast neoplasm
• General surgery
• Radiotherapy
• Sentinel lymph node biopsy
• Axilla
• Local control
• Regional control