Causes of death and metastatic patterns in patients with mammary cancer. Ten-year autopsy study.

As periodic evaluation of the causes of death in cancer patients may provide guidelines for further research on supportive care in cancer, the authors studied autopsy records of 144 mammary-cancer patients from the past ten years. The causes of death were analyzed and compared for the first and second five-year periods. During the first five-year period (65 cases), death was caused by the malignant process itself in 70.8% of the patients, by infection in 10.8% and by hemorrhage in 7.7%. During the second five-year period (79 cases), the malignant process itself was still the most frequent cause of death but in only 47.4% of the patients, and deaths due to infections (23.7%) and hemorrhages (9.2%) were relatively more frequent, without noticeable changes in the patients' survival times. These findings may be related to the more aggressive methods of treatment applied in recent years. The metastases to the organs tended to be massive, and except for the lymph nodes, the lung was the organ most frequently involved by tumors (60%), followed by bone (54%), liver (54%), adrenal gland (36%), pleura (36%) and brain (26%). As the chance of life-threatening infections is great in mammary cancer, the early detection and treatment of infections in mammary-cancer patients could become an important factor in prolonging the survival of these patients.