Keywords
Breast conserving therapy, re-excision rates, lumpectomy, breast cancer
Disciplines
Surgery
Abstract
As breast conserving therapy has become the standard of care for patients with early stage breast cancer an area of debate within the surgical literature has been the rate of positive surgical margins requiring re-excision. Nationally re-excision rates are highly variable and have been reported as high as 40%. Any cancer diagnosis and treatment is stressful for patients and having to return to the operating room for a second surgery can greatly affect both patient satisfaction and cosmetic outcomes. Within our institution we wanted to examined our population over ten years undergoing breast conserving therapy to determine our re-excision rates as compared to nationally reported rates. We also wanted to address if following the January of 2013 position statement from the American Society of Breast Surgeons that proposed a treatment algorithm for determining the need for re-excision of surgical margins. We found that our overall re-excision rates were 16%, compared to the national reported rates of 20-40%. Within our patient population we also found that our re-excision rate decreased after January 2013 from 20% to eight percent.
