In the industrialised countries breast cancer is the cancer with the highest prevalence and causes the highest rate of cancer deaths among women. In Switzerland alone, about 5000 newly diagnosed cases occur per year. Our three main diagnostic tools in ...

Tamoxifen is the standard treatment in premenopausal hormonreceptor positive breast cancer patients with additional benefit in some of these women by adding ovarian ablation or suppression. Actual trials are investigating the use of more complete ...

Adjuvant chemotherapy dramatically improves prognosis for early breast cancer. Large, international randomized studies with thousands of patients not only introduced new effective drugs, but also led towards more individualized treatment strategies based ...

A great step was taken in the treatment of the prognostically unfavourable group of Her2-positive breast cancer in the past years with the introduction of the targeted therapy with trastuzumab, which showed significant increase in median survival in the ...

During the last decades the treatment of breast cancer has changed considerably. Radical surgical procedures have increasingly been replaced by breast conserving therapy including radiation therapy of the whole breast (WBI). This change in treatment ...

Trastuzumab (Herceptin®) is a humanized monoclonal antibody recognizing the human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER-2/neu). This receptor is overexpressed in 20–30% of invasive breast carcinomas. HER-2/neu normally regulates cell growth and survival,...

Pregnancy-associated breast cancer is a rare disease with an incidence of 1:3000. There is no indication anymore to terminate the pregnancy since the maternal prognosis will not be influenced. Due to physiologic pregnancy related changes in the breast, ...

Hormone therapy (HT), in peri- and postmenopause has been associated with a modest increase in the risk of breast cancer. Hormones play a major role in tumorigenesis of breast cancer, and reproductive factors are known to influence breast cancer risk. ...

It is currently estimated that 25–30% of all breast cancers have a familial background. The breast cancer lifetime risk of first degree relatives with a family history of breast cancer may be classified as slightly, moderately or highly increased above ...