Is triple-negative breast cancer a justification for mastectomy or breast conservative surgery? An institutional experience.

Background: the debate of breast conservative surgery (BCS) and modified radical mastectomy (MRM) is not over in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), so we aimed to highlight the differences in recurrence rates, disease-free survival, and overall survival in the two major surgical procedures of BCS and MRM among a retrospective cohort of TNBC patients.
Patients and methods: 73 women with TNBC (ER-ve, PR-ve, HER2 neu-ve) were collected from patients' data registry system from the beginning of 2011 to the end of 2012, and then their files were reviewed for different clinical, pathological, surgical procedures, neoadjuvant and adjuvant treatment, and response criteria, also, different patterns of failures, prognostic factors, whenever available, and survivals.
Results: 54.8% (40 patients) of women underwent MRM while 45.2% (33 patients) of women only underwent BCS, more local recurrences were gained in those women with BCS than MRM (P=0.038) without significant difference in the time to local recurrence among both groups (P=0.4), also no significant differences in disease-free survival P=0.1, but overall survival was significantly better for BCS compared to MRM (P=0.007).
Conclusion: We found that more local recurrences were developed in the BCS group than the MRM group but the BCS group had significantly better OS than the MRM group. So, it is too early to conclude that MRM is the standard of care for TNBC, and further large multicentric studies are needed to disclose this debate