Ambulatory SNP Under Local Anaesthesia in a Subgroup of Breast Cancer Patients - Trial

Rationale: In breast cancer (BC) patients, lymph node status is a key prognostic indicator. At present, axillary ultrasound (US) with subsequent fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) of suspicious lymph nodes (US+FNAC) is widely used as a pre-operative staging method. When US+FNAC is negative, a sentinel node procedure (SNP) is performed during breast surgery. Nowadays, an axillary lymph node dissection (ALND) is generally performed if one of the abovementioned diagnostic entities reveals lymph node metastases. However, the extensive role of ALND in BC patients with lymph node metastases may change or diminish in upcoming years due to emerging evidence that completion ALND (cALND) does not affect disease-free survival and overall survival in early BC patients with (sentinel) node-positive disease. Whether ALND is needed in these patients, should be based on (axillary) tumour load. Because of the fact that tumour load can only be reliably evaluated by SNP and not by US+FNAC, the role of SNP might become even more important in upcoming years. Ideally, the status of this sentinel lymph node is known prior to breast surgery, so a patient tailored treatment plan can be made and discussed with the patient before breast surgery. In this context, it would be very logical to perform a SNP under local anaesthesia (LA), prior to breast surgery. This might not only lead to significantly less two-step surgical procedures under general anaesthesia (GA), but might also lead to a reduction of depressive symptoms and anxiety and improved quality of life (QoL) of BC patients, because BC patients are in particular risk for psychological distress in the first three months after diagnosis of BC. Knowing lymph node status and the complete treatment plan as soon as possible (by performing a SNP under LA), might reduce this psychological distress. To investigate which BC patients would benefit most from SNP under LA, the investigators recently analysed 1132 BC patients retrospectively. B