This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on Web of Science (4)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: Mr Riley and colleagues¹ identified a significant increase of breast-conserving surgery (BCS) as well as of radiation therapy following BCS from 1988 to 1993 in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program linked to Medicare enrollment records. In our recent analyses using the SEER Public Use Data Set, we found that the use of BCS without radiation therapy has, in fact, also increased over time. We identified 35,267 women who were diagnosed as having local or regional stage breast cancer at age 65 years or older between 1988 and 1993 and had either a mastectomy or BCS (the definition of the surgery was the same as reported by Riley et al). The percentage of BCS increased from 23.1% in 1988 to 40.5% in 1993. Of 11,409 patients who received BCS, the use of radiation after BCS increased from 57.7% in 1988 to 63.9% in 1993. Ironically, . . . [Full Text of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLE

Stage at Diagnosis and Treatment Patterns Among Older Women With Breast Cancer: An HMO and Fee-for-Service Comparison
Gerald F. Riley, Arnold L. Potosky, Carrie N. Klabunde, Joan L. Warren, and Rachel Ballard-Barbash
JAMA. 1999;281(8):720-726.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT