Do Follow-up Tests Actually Help Detect Recurrent Disease?

Extract

For several years, patients have been filing a large number of lawsuits because they believe their physicians did not do enough testing to follow up early-stage breast cancer. “We all have friends and colleagues who have been sued because they didn’t get a bone scan in a patient who now has metastatic disease,” said Cliff A. Hudis, M.D.

In spite of this pressure, Hudis, who spoke recently at the Lynn Sage Breast Cancer Symposium in Chicago, argued that, aside from mammograms, history, and physical exam, all other tests to look for recurrent disease—chest x-rays, bone scans, and serum marker and liver function tests—are not justified by the current data.

To back up his claim, Hudis, who is from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, cited a 1994 study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in which Charles L. Loprinzi, M.D., from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and his colleagues looked at a large series of breast cancer patients with early-stage cancer.