Key clinical point: Preoperative breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has low accuracy in predicting nodal status after neoadjuvant therapy in patients with invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC), suggesting that axillary findings on posttreatment breast MRI should not be used to plan surgical approach to the axilla.
Major finding: Overall, the accuracy of posttreatment breast MRI in predicting axillary nodal status ranged from 45.5% to 66.7%. The overall accuracy of MRI for predicting nodal status was similar among patients treated with neoadjuvant endocrine therapy (ET) vs. chemotherapy (66.7% vs. 50%; P = .1393).
Study details : Findings are from a retrospective analysis of 79 women with stage I-III ILC who underwent preoperative breast MRI after either neoadjuvant chemotherapy (n=46) or ET (n=33).
Disclosures: This publication was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institute of Health. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
Source: Abel MK et al. NPJ Breast Cancer. 2021 Mar 5. doi: 10.1038/s41523-021-00233-9 .