The relationship between tumour size, nodal status and distant metastases: on the origins of breast cancer.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:In patients with breast cancer, increasing tumour size at diagnosis is associated with an increased likelihood of axillary lymph node involvement and increased breast cancer-specific mortality. However, this relation is based on studies which combine all tumours smaller than 1.0 cm in a single category and all tumours larger than 5.0 cm in another category. This coarse classification may obscure a nuanced description of the effects of tumour size across the full range of possible sizes. METHODS:We examined the relationship between primary tumour size, lymph node status and distant metastases in a cohort of 819,647 women diagnosed with first primary invasive breast cancer from 1990 to 2014 in the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) registries database. All patients

SUBMITTER: Sopik V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6022519 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature