Abstract
Despite improvements of the therapy for breast cancer, a proportion of the patients still get local recurrence. The status of the surgical margins is the most often used parameter for decision regarding additional treatment. However, a negative margin is not a guarantee that there is not residual cancer left in the breast; additional parameters are needed to better predict the risk of local recurrence. The disease extent was evaluated in the surgical specimen from 313 women after breast-conserving therapy using large-section histology and was correlated to the incidence of local recurrence. A disease extent ≥4 cm was shown to be an independent marker for local recurrence; the cumulative 10-year local relapse rate for the group with a disease extent ≥4 cm was 20.5%, and for the rest 6.7%. We conclude that disease extent ≥4 cm seems to be an important factor when evaluating the risk for local recurrence.