Lobular Breast Cancer Can Be Managed Like Ductal Cancer

TUESDAY, May 9 (HealthDay News) -- Women with infiltrating lobular breast carcinoma who undergo breast-conserving therapy have similar outcomes as patients with the more common invasive ductal breast carcinoma and do not require more extensive preoperative evaluation, according to a study in the June 15 issue of Cancer.

Monica Morrow, M.D., from the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, and colleagues compared outcomes for 318 patients with pure or mixed infiltrating lobular carcinoma (ILC) with 636 matched patients with invasive ductal carcinoma.

The researchers found that patients with ILC were older and had larger tumors. Twenty-five percent had contraindications to breast-conserving therapy compared with only 20 percent of controls with ductal carcinoma. However, there were no differences in the success rates in women who were candidates for breast-conserving therapy between the two groups, and the numbers of procedures for women undergoing breast-conserving therapy was similar in the two groups.

"Patients with ILC are not more likely to fail breast-conserving therapy than those with invasive ductal carcinoma, nor do they require more operations to obtain negative margins," Morrow and colleagues conclude. "These results do not support the use of more extensive preoperative evaluation such as magnetic resonance imaging in patients with ILC."

Abstract
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