Results of Conservative or Radical Breast Surgeries in Patients Operated on at Centro de Investigaciones Médico Quirúrgicas, Cuba

Abstract

Introduction: Cancer has caused more deaths than all known wars and catastrophes. Particularly speaking, breast cancer has become a pandemic that threatens to continue to spread.

Objective: To describe the differences based on the results obtained from conservative and radical surgery as a treatment for breast cancer.

Methods: An analytical, observational, descriptive and retrospective study was carried out with a universe of 177 female patients diagnosed with breast cancer in the general surgery service of Centro de Investigaciones Médico Quirúrgicas, of La Habana, Cuba. All of them received surgical treatment in the period from January 2011 to December 2016.

Results: 92.09% of the patients studied had no history of breast pathology, while 36.72% had breast cancer as a family pathological history. Patients over 70 years of age predominated in both surgical techniques. In the group of 30-40 years of age only conservative techniques were performed. With respect to staging, there was a predominance of the disease in stage II. Overall survival at 5 years was higher than 90%, while the disease-free interval remained at similar values for both techniques.

Conclusions: A greater amount of breast-conserving surgeries were performed in patients at earlier clinical stages of the disease, while overall survival of conservative procedures was slightly higher.