Correlation Between Pathologic Complete Response in the Breast and Absence of Axillary Lymph Node Metastases After Neoadjuvant Systemic Therapy

Abstract

Breast pCR achieved after NST is strongly correlated with ypN0 in cN0 patients, especially in ER+HER2+, ER-HER2+, and triple negative subtypes. These results provide data to proceed with future clinical trials to investigate if axillary surgery can be safely omitted in these selected patients when image-guided tissue sampling identifies a breast pCR.