Welela Tereffe, MD, associate professor, Department of Radiation Oncology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discussed treatment for patients who received neoadjuvant chemotherapy.
This review showed that neoadjuvant chemotherapy could risk-stratify patients into two groups. The first, low-risk group, wouldn’t receive benefit from post-mastectomy radiation and the other would be a high-risk group that would benefit from escalated treatment such as radiation.
Tereffe says patients who have received neoadjuvant chemotherapy must be treated in a multidisciplinary fashion.
Something that is important for both multidisciplinary physicians and the public to know, says Tereffe, is that the short and long term toxicities of radiation is very manageable in the modern era, even for patients with left-sided tumors.
