Eight-year experience with the intraoperative frozen section examination of sentinel lymph node biopsy for breast cancer in a North-Italian university center.

Eight-year experience with the intraoperative frozen section examination of sentinel lymph node biopsy for breast cancer in a North-Italian university center. Int J Clin Exp Pathol. 2014;7(1):364-71 Authors: Cedolini C, Bertozzi S, Seriau L, Londero AP, Concina S, Cattin F, Geatti O, Di Loreto C, Risaliti A Abstract Sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) completely changed the impact of breast surgery on patients psycho-physical wellness, reducing morbidity associated with complete axillary lymph node dissection (CALND) while granting an adequate breast cancer staging. We reviewed our experience with the SLNB in a University Clinic. We collected data about all breast cancer patients submitted to SLNB from 2002 to 2010, and analyzed them with R (version 2.15.2), considering significant p<0.05. We performed 615 SLNBs on 607 patients, with a mean age of 59.86 (±10.76). Sentinel node detection rate resulted 99,7%, with a mean number of biopsied nodes of 1.64 (±0.67), axillary localization in 98% of cases, and negative intraoperative histological finding in the 86.2% of cases. Prevalence of ITCs, micrometastasis, macrometastasis and pericapsular metastasis resulted respectively 0.6%, 4.9%, 7.5% and 8.8%. Among women who received CALND, mean number of examined nodes was 16.36 (±6.19) and mean number of metastatic non-sentinel nodes was 0.97 in case of micrometastasis, 2.65 in case of macrometastasis, and up to 9.88 when pericapsular invas...
Source: Clinical Breast Cancer - Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Tags: Int J Clin Exp Pathol Source Type: research