Inflammatory breast carcinoma: results from sixteen patients treated with chemo-radiotherapy and surgery.

Inflammatory breast carcinoma is a dramatic tumour with a five-year survival rate of almost 3%. Various therapeutic approaches have been made for this neoplasia: surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, alone or in combination. The best results were obtained with the use of a multidisciplinary approach. The authors developed a treatment in which chemotherapy and radiotherapy, together with surgery, are used. After three cycles of CMF (cyclophosphamide, methotrexate, 5-fluorouracil) the patients with partial remission, no change or disease progression were changed to adriamycin + vincristine plus radiotherapy. Surgery was performed on patients with complete remission or partial remission after chemo-radiotherapy. After surgery, maintenance chemotherapy was used with the more active drugs. The actuarial survival rate at 5 years was 30.65% and median survival 34 months.