Ryu et al — Aberrant Contralateral Axilla Drainage in IBTR
Verified verbatim
A meta-analysis of 28 articles and 9588 patients found that the incidence of lymphedema after SLNB ranged from 0%–63.4%.
Contralateral axillary metastasis is considered distant metastasis, therefore, contralateral axillary drainage should not be underestimated. However, the reported incidence of contralateral axillary lymph node metastasis is only between 3.5% and 6.0% in patients with breast cancer. Even a nation-wide registration study, which was a Sentinel Node and Recurrent Breast Cancer (SNARB) study, could not analyze the factors that could affect the contralateral axilla metastasis.
My take
Two useful numbers for the Discussion: the wide lymphoedema range after SLNB, and the CAM incidence band (3.5–6.0%), which brackets nicely with Chowdhury et al.’s melanoma-specific 1.1%.