Breast Cancer: Current Research
Open Access

Abstract

Brain metastasis is the principle cause of death for breast cancer, we have conducted a series of studies on the occurrence, development, and treatment of breast cancer brain metastasis. Firstly, we analyze the clinical characteristics and prognostic factors of breast cancer patients with brain metastases, and found that WBRT+SRS is better than WBRT alone in multiple brain metastases, SRS alone can replace WBRT+SRS used in patients with less than three brain metastases. We also constructed a nomogram for predicting 1st and 2nd year overall survival, which exhibited good accuracy in predicting overall survival. Secondly, we investigated the risk and relapse of perihippocampal (PH) metastases in breast cancer, and found that hippocampal metastases were identified in 1.2% of metastases and 4.1% of patients. pH lesions comprised 3.5% of lesions in 11.1% of patients. The risks of PH metastasis recurrence were 4.6% for WBRT and 6.8% for sub-therapeutic irradiation in the pH region. Thirdly, we invested the characteristics of cystic BM in a large cohort of breast cancer patients and found patients with cystic metastasis were characterized by a larger metastasis volume, a shorter progression-free survival (PFS) following their first treatment for BM, and poor overall survival after BM (p<0.05). This study shows that cystic BM from breast cancer, a special morphological type of BM, had worse prognosis than the more commonly observed solid BM. Fourthly, we revealed that reirradiation is an effective and a safe treatment for patients with brain metastases from breast cancer. Patients with a high KPS score, stable extracranial metastasis and good response to reirradiation might be benefit from reirradiation, whereas patients with peritumoral edema, cystic brain metastasis and a low KPS score might not be appropriate candidates for reirradiation.

Biography

Email: skywu4923@sina.com