Trends for inflammatory breast cancer: is survival improving?

The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether the survival of women with inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) treated at our institution has improved over the past 30 years. Three-hundred ninety-eight patients with IBC were treated between 1974 and 2005. Patient characteristics and outcomes were tabulated and compared among decades of diagnosis. Survival outcomes were estimated with the Kaplan-Meier product limit method and compared among groups with the log-rank statistic. Cox proportional hazards models were fit to determine the association between year of diagnosis and survival outcomes after adjustment for patient and disease characteristics and treatments received. The median follow-up was 5.8 years (range, 0.3-23.8 years). There were 238 recurrences and 236 deaths. The median recurrence-free survival (RFS) duration was 2.3 years and the median overall survival (OS) time was 4.2 years. In the models for RFS and OS, after adjustment for patient and disease characteristics, increasing year of diagnosis was not associated with a decrease in the risk for recurrence (hazard ratio, [HR], 1.00; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.97-1.04) or death (HR, 0.97; 95% CI, 0.94-1.01). Our data show that there has not been an important change in the prognosis of patients with IBC in the last 30 years. Clinical trials focusing on the management of this aggressive disease are warranted. Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest is found at the end of this article.