Safety and efficacy of immediate autologous breast reconstruction after mastectomy in patients undergoing neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy for locally advanced breast cancer.

Purpose: Immediate autologous breast reconstruction (IABR) offers fewer surgeries with better psychosocial, quality of life and aesthetic outcomes. In high-risk patients or those with locally advanced breast cancer (LABC), adjuvant postmastectomy radiotherapy decreases local recurrence and improves survival. However, it has negative effects on the reconstructed flap.

Female breast cancer management and survival: The experience of major public hospitals in South Australia over 3 decades-trends by age and in the elderly.

Background: Clinical registry data from major South Australian public hospitals were used to investigate trends in invasive breast-cancer treatment and survival by age.

Methods: Disease-specific survival was calculated for the 1980 to 2013 diagnostic period using Kaplan-Meier product-limit estimates, with a censoring of live cases on December 31, 2014. Cox proportional hazards regression was used to examine differences in survival by age and tumour characteristic.

Breast cancer screening-opportunistic use of registry and linked screening data for local evaluation.

Rationale: Screening has been found to reduce breast cancer mortality at a population level in Australia, but these studies did not address local settings where numbers of deaths would generally have been too low for evaluation. Clinicians, administrators, and consumer groups are also interested in local service outcomes. We therefore use more common prognostic and treatment measures and survivals to gain evidence of screening effects among patients attending 4 local hospitals for treatment.

National Breast Cancer Audit: establishing a web-based data system.

Background: An audit of surgical treatment of early breast cancer was introduced nationally in 1999. In August 2002, the Australian Safety and Efficacy Register of New Interventional Procedures - Surgical, under the auspices of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, assumed responsibility for managing this audit. This article provides an update of audit activities, now known formally as the National Breast Cancer Audit (NBCA), including a description of the new governance structure and the development of a secure online surgical audit system.