32 Background: The University of Tennessee Medical Center (UTMCK), Knoxville Tennessee is the region’s sole academic medical center. Annually, 3000 new patients are seen within the Cancer Institute (CI) of UTMCK, and over 13% are breast cancer patients. Under the leadership of our director, Surgical Oncologist Dr. John L. Bell, survivorship care has been offered to these patients for almost twenty years. This combination has created a unique opportunity for us to look at long term results of offering disease-specific survivorship care, and what effect it has made upon detection of recurrence. Methods: Tumor registry data was utilized to examine the influence of survivorship care upon detection of recurrence. All patients treated from 1999 – 2015 with a diagnosis of recurrent breast cancer were selected out of the tumor registry. These patients were then stratified by time to recurrence, and mean, median, and range were calculated in time to recurrence (TR) by month. Results: A total of 223 patients with recurrent breast cancer were identified in our tumor registry out of 4422 total breast cancer patients treated by UTMCK from 1999 – 2015, recurrence rate of 5.04%. The mean TR for this cohort was 43.9 months. The median TR was 33 months, and the range of TR varied from 4 months to 166 months. All patients were followed for a minimum of five years following their diagnosis, and by 60 months, 73.99% of all recurrences were identified. Conclusions: Offering disease specific survivorship care to breast cancer patients is beneficial to both patients and our institution. When recurrence is diagnosed, survivorship care is valuable by helping to identify these cases as early as possible, to get patients back into active treatment sooner in the disease process. We have demonstrated that this is not a recent phenomenon reflective of current practice changes and accreditation requirements, and have validated this with our institution’s long history of providing survivorship care services for breast cancer patients dating back to the last century.
Serum prolactin responses to TRH in recurrent breast cancer patients.