We often hear physicians, health care professionals, poli- ticians, and patient advocates that "nothing has happened in the treatment of breast cancer," since patients with breast cancer, the most frequent neoplastic condition in women in industrialized countries, are continuing to suffer relapse and succumb to this dreadful disease This negativistic attitude does not seem to be justified, but, why is the transmission of clinical trial results into general practice, and with it progress, such a slow process? After many decades of frustrating stagnation of long-term survival expectations, in...

The ultimate "consumer" of the data presented at conferences on the primary treatment of operable breast cancer is the patient, and when, as in this disease, the benefits of therapy are relatively mod- est, the availability and interpretation of the data from trials be- comes an issue of primary importance. The effects of present treat- ment are in fact such that more patients relapse despite therapy than are estimated to benefit from it. It is, therefore, extremely dif- ficult for the physician to recommend unequivocally one particular adjuvant treatment modality for the vast population of...

This volume represents an up-to-date survey of current (mainly clinical) research on the treatment of primary breast cancer, summarizing most of the expert lectures given at the 4th International Conference on Adjuvant Therapy of Primary Breast Cancer in February 1992 in St. Gallen, Switzerland. It covers relevant topics from biological mechanisms on cell kill and overcoming drug resistance to new aspects of breast conserving surgery and adjuvant endocrine as well as cytotoxic therapies; updating results of most important international trials on adjuvant therapy of breast cancer. Of...

This RRCR-conference-volume marks "number six" in a 20-year evolution of international conferences on the adjuvant therapy of primary breast cancer. Starting in 1978, a handful of some 80 en- thusiastic breast cancer surgeons and oncologists, met in a se- cluded mountain resort near st. Gallen in Eastern Switzerland, to exchange their early data of some pioneer trials on adjuvant sys- temic therapy of early breast cancer, and to correlate their future research efforts to overcome the frustrating prognostic stagna- tion of this dominant neoplastic disease in Western females dur- ing the past...