Breast Cancer Surveillance Guidelines

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) has updated the 2006 version of its breast cancer surveillance guidelines.In short, there are no changes to the guidelines.It is worth reviewing the gist of the guidelines, as summarized in Table 1, compared with what oncologists reported they do in a survey.The low averages do not adequately represent the true variation-we all know oncologists who routinely perform these tests.Unpublished reports show some 30% to 40% of practices routinely measure serum tumor markers and perform computed tomography or positron emission tomography scans.The data are hard to find, given that practitioners have not been supposed to do these tests for a decade.