Radiotherapeutic management of early breast cancer.

Radiation therapy has been used for the management of breast cancer for many years. Traditionally, it has been an adjunct to the radical mastectomy, but in recent decades major centers have initiated studies replacing the mastectomy with a more limited surgical procedure and, at the same time, have increased the irradiated volume to include all the remaining breast tissue.For early, infiltrating duct breast cancer, results of these studies using modern therapy units combined with appropriate local surgery have been consistent and comparable in both local control and long-term survival to published results with the modified mastectomy. The definition of "early breast cancer" and how should it be applied to the patient is discussed for both clinical stage I and stage II breast cancer patients following a brief review of the major studies.