The significance of delay in relation to prognosis of patients with primary operable breast cancer

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

HE purpose of this study was to ascertain T the prognosis for a group of patients subjected to radical mastectomy, to separate prognosis according to delay before operation, size of lesion, and node involvement, to attempt to "explain" differences in prognosis that might result, and to analyLe differcnces for statistical 5ignificance.Many factors have been suggested as possibly affecting the survival of patients with breast cancer.One such factor is the delay between the onset and the operation, Others are histological grade of the lesion, resistance of thc patient, rate of growth of the lesion, route of spread, resistance to spread, and so forth.Unfortunately, most of these factors cannot be studied directly, and there is a paucity of knowledge concerning the pattern of the growth of cancer in humans.It is not known whether the lesion grows at a regular rate, increases intermittently, or has episodes of explosive growth.T h e pattern of spread is also not completely understood.It is not known whether spread can occur at any time after the onset, whether it depends on the attainment of a certain si7e of lesion, or whether it is related to the location of thc lesion.T h e factors that we chose to measure are subject to a number of deficiencies.While one might hope that there would be a correlation between the "delay from onset of cancer to operation" and "delay from onset of symptoms to operation," the correlation is an imperfect one at best, because the measurement of the size of the lesion, while itself reliable, does not provide information about the rate of growth.Thc information on spread, (node involvement and leveI involved) does not give too clear a picture of the dynamics of spread.