Breast cancer prognosis. III. Prognostic factors in patients with distant metastases (M1) at the time of diagnosis.

Predictors of breast cancer survival were investigated among 66 patients who had distant metastases at the time of diagnosis (M1). All of these patients were treated at the Department of Surgery of the University Hospital for Tumors in Zagreb between 1969-1988. Selected prognostic factors included patient age, delay in treatment, tumor size, type of lymph node affection, response to palliative surgical treatment and administered chemotherapy or hormonal therapy, and site of metastasizing. Among these predictors, several of them revealed a significant impact on a median survival (in months) of these patients: the most important was the response to chemotherapy (p < 0.001), followed by site of metastasizing (p < 0.05) and primary tumor size (p < 0.05). Palliative surgical treatment, apart from improvement of life quality, played no role in determining the survival among breast cancer patients with a distant disease.