In half of breast cancer patients with positive sentinel nodes, the sentinel nodes are the only metastatic nodes. Such patients have no more metastatic nonsentinel nodes and do not need to undergo axillary lymph node dissection. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether three-axillary lymph node sampling after sentinel node biopsy predicts the status of nonsentinel nodes in patients with sentinel node metastases.
Department of Surgery, Osaka Medical Center for Cancer and Cardiovascular Diseases, 1-3-3 Nakamichi, Higashinari-ku, Osaka, 537-8511, Japan. motomurak@hotmail.com
