[Inflammatory cancer of the breast. Assessment after 6 years of 16 patients treated by primary immunochemotherapy].

Sixteen patients with clinical primary inflammatory carcinoma of the breast were treated with initial immunochemotherapy from September 1974 to May 1977. This chemotherapy was an association of adriamycin, vincristine, fluorouracil, methotrexate, and melphalan. Thermographic cooling was taken as the criterion of operability. Chemotherapy was resumed after surgery up to a total of ten periods, and followed by a minimum one year chemotherapy. I-BCG-F Pasteur was used as immunotherapy and associated with the chemotherapy regimen. Five patients have died, four are alive with disease, and seven are free of disease at time of reporting. Median survival exceeds 90 months. Our data supports the conclusion that mastectomy combined with preoperative and postoperative immunochemotherapy may permit a better prognosis for inflammatory carcinoma of the breast: this benefit seems to be the consequence of adapting the length of initial chemotherapy to the data given by plate-thermography.