ABSTRACT
A search for prognostic discriminants of treatment failure in the tenth postmastectomy year was undertaken in 614 patients enrolled in protocol no. 4 of the National Surgical Adjuvant Project for Breast Cancers treated by radical mastectomy. Exploratory analysis of 38 pathologic and 6 clinical features disclosed 16 and 13 variables significantly related to nodal status and treatment failure, respectively. However, multivariate analyses with life tables adjusted or controlled for nodal status revealed that patients whose tumors measured less than 2 cm had a more favorable clinical course. All of the characteristics were also explored when patients were stratified according to numbers of nodal metastases, the most significant prognostic discriminant for disease-free survival in the tenth year. High histologic grade according to the authors’ conventional grading method were observed to adversely influence disease-free survival in patients with negative nodes. Histologic grade and tumor size were significantly recognized as discriminatory in patients with 4+ nodes. It was therefore concluded that nodal category, histologic grade, and tumor size, in the contexts noted, represent strong prognostic discriminants exerting a rather constant influence on disease-free survival at least to the tenth postmastectomy period. The prognostic value of categorizing those patients with 4+ positive nodes into subgroups with 4 to 6, 7 to 12 and 13+ was reaffirmed. The actual diseasefree survival of patients in the tenth year was not strikingly different from that observed previously by the authors at 5 years in this cohort.
