Castration in the treatment of advanced breast cancer

NDOCRINE ABLATION SURGERY HAS ESTAB-E lished empirically that some breast cancers are hormone-dependent while others are not. Although we know that estrogen acts synergistically with other hormones to cause normal breast development, little is really known regarding the specific differences in hormonal concentration which cause responsiveness in some tumors of the breast. This lack of understanding, as indicated by Crooke,5 is due in part to the fact that the human endocrine environment is almost impossible to assess adequately with our present methods of assay.