Age and Axillary Lymph Node Ratio in Postmenopausal Women with T1-T2 Node Positive Breast Cancer

Abstract

After completing this course, the reader will be able to:1. Identify changes in medical/surgical practice that can affect the prognostic performance of established prognostic factors such as lymph node involvement in breast cancer.2. Explain how the lymph node ratio can help to adjust against practice-related changes.3. Use the lymph node ratio as a measure of tumor burden in order to weigh the risk of breast cancer death against other causes of death in elderly patients.This article is available for continuing medical education credit at CME.TheOncologist.com. CME CME ABSTRACTPurpose. The purpose of this article was to examine the relationship between age and lymph node ratio (LNR, number of positive nodes divided by number of examined nodes), and to determine their effects on breast cancer (BC) and overall mortality. The Oncologist CME Program is located online at http://cme.theoncologist.com/. Methods. Women aged >50 years, diagnosed in 1988 -To take the CME activity related to this article, you must be a registered user. Breast CancerThe

Impact of Lymph Node Ratio on the Survival of Patients with Hypopharyngeal Squamous Cell Carcinoma: A Population-Based Analysis

“…[14] The SEER set has been widely used for the analysis of LNR staging of breast, colon, gastric and other cancers. [11], [15], [16].…”

Lymph Node Ratio is More Predictive than Traditional Lymph Node Stratification in Lymph Node Positive Invasive Breast Cancer

“…Patients were excluded as the follow criteria: (a) obtained neoadjuvant chemotherapy before operation, (b) the total excision lymph nodes less than 10 (Singletary et al, 2002;Vinh-Hung et al, 2009), and bilateral BC (Vinh-Hung et al, 2010). Two hundred and ninety four BC patients with lymph nodes positive were enrolled with 116 cases from Group A, and 178 cases from Group B.…”

Can axillary lymph node ratio (LNR) predict local recurrences or deaths in patients with breast cancer with nodal involvement?

“…They concluded that oncologist can be confident that prognosis and decisions on adjuvant therapies can be based on pN classification alone when adequate axillary dissections are performed (>15 nodes) but suggest that pN and LNR should be used on conjunction otherwise [2]. In our study, the mean number of axillary lymph nodes that were examined was [15], which could account for non-significance of our findings.…”

“…The LNR was calculated as the total number of positive lymph nodes divided by the total number of lymph nodes found and examined. The cohort was then divided into 3 groups based on established LNR cut-offs [4,12,15,16,21] defined as low risk, 0.01-0.20; intermediate-risk, 0.21-0.65; and high-risk, >0.65. We examined the prognostic value of Lymph Node Ration (LNR) for patients with node-positive breast cancer with varying numbers of minimum nodes removed.…”

“…Recent studies explore the impact of the Lymph Node Ratio (LNR), defined as the number of positive LNs over the number of excised nodes [14][15][16][17]. There is evidence that LNR is a useful predictor of breast cancer recurrence and survival, and some studies found its prognostic superiority over absolute number of positive nodes [2,13,14,16,[18][19][20].…”