Prognosis in Breast Cancer

Abstract

Only one-half of patients presenting with primary breast cancer are cured by local therapy. It is thus desirable to have a method to predict which patients are likely to have a recurrence so that systemic therapy can be instituted to delay, or even prevent, such recurrences. For many years, our laboratory in San Antonio has been measuring factors in human breast cancer patients which have been hypothesized to correlate with clinical outcome. Our efforts have dealt primarily with the prognostic factors listed in Table 1. We will briefly review each of these prognostic factors and provide the essential data which correlates each factor with clinical outcome. In this summary of San Antonio efforts, we will not attempt to review the literature or detail the work of others.

This work was supported by grant number NIH CA30195.