Surgical Management of Breast Cancer in Saudi Arabia before and after Outreach Activities

We collected management information from the 1996 referral documents of 100 consecutive patients who came to us for continued treatment of breast cancer. Major deficiencies were noted with regard to clinical assessment, surgery, and pathology. Since 1997 we have intensified our personnel contacts with referring surgeons, and we have performed outreach visits. To measure the effect of our efforts, we repeated the same collection of information between March 2001 and March 2002. Correct performance of TNM (tumor, node metastasis) classification decreased from 36%–16%. The use of mammography increased from 29%–56%, application of fine needle aspiration (FNA) increased from 46%–70%, and use of core needle biopsy (CNB) increased from 0%–6%. The rate of performance of triple assessment (including correct performance of TNM) was 9% and is now 10%. The number of patients who had surgery before referral decreased from 84%–46%. A proper metastatic work‐up in the present study was performed in 10% of patients, and mammography was performed in 33% of the patients who had either modified radical mastectomy (MRM) or breast conserving therapy (BCT). Previously, 78 patients had 98 operations before referral and 75% of those needed additional surgery; now only 9 patients out of 39 who had incisional biopsy or lumpectomy needed further surgery. The median number of lymph nodes now is 10, whereas previously 42% of the axillary dissections yielded < 8 lymph nodes. Pathology reports mentioning both tumor size and surgical margins have increased from 29%–53%. These new data indicate that there is a need to join all hospitals in a national guidelines plan for the management of breast cancer.