ReviewNPJ breast cancer2018
Hypothesis: can the abscopal effect explain the impact of adjuvant radiotherapy on breast cancer mortality?
Review in NPJ breast cancer, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- Incidental axillary dose delivery to axillary lymph node levels I-III by different techniques of whole-breast irradiation: a systematic literature review.Strahlentherapie und Onkologie : Organ der Deutschen Rontgengesellschaft ... [et al] · 2021Pooled it
- Survival after breast-conserving surgery and radiotherapy versus mastectomy: propensity score analyses within a randomized anaesthesiology trial.The British journal of surgery · 2026Trial
- Cryoablation for breast cancer: a narrative review of advances, clinical applications, and future challenges.Translational cancer research · 2025Review
- Retrospective evaluation of the contribution of radiotherapy to survival in breast cancer treatment with propensity score based on stage and subgroup.Radiation oncology (London, England) · 2024Article
- Shoulder function following oncoplastic breast conserving surgery-a narrative review.Gland surgery · 2024Review
- Awaken Immune Cells by Hapten Enhanced Intratumoral Chemotherapy with Penicillin Prolong Pancreatic Cancer Survival.Journal of Cancer · 2023Article
- Leveraging cryoablation and checkpoint inhibitors for high-risk triple negative breast cancer.Frontiers in immunology · 2023Review
- Breast-Conserving Surgery or Mastectomy?: Impact on Survival.Annals of surgery open : perspectives of surgical history, education, and clinical approaches · 2022Article
- Radiobiological effects of wound fluid on breast cancer cell lines and human-derived tumor spheroids in 2D and microfluidic culture.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Breast-conserving therapy is associated with better survival than mastectomy in Early-stage breast cancer: A propensity score analysis.Cancer medicine · 2022Article
- Article
- Circulating immune cell populations related to primary breast cancer, surgical removal, and radiotherapy revealed by flow cytometry analysis.Breast cancer research : BCR · 2021Article
- The impact of progesterone receptor negativity on oncological outcomes in oestrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer.BJS open · 2021Article
- Novel Oncolytic Herpes Simplex Virus 1 VC2 Promotes Long-Lasting, Systemic Anti-melanoma Tumor Immune Responses and Increased Survival in an Immunocompetent B16F10-Derived Mouse Melanoma Model.Journal of virology · 2021Article
- Breast-Conserving Therapy Has Better Prognosis for Tumors in the Central and Nipple Portion of Breast Cancer Compared with Mastectomy: A SEER Data-Based Study.Frontiers in oncology · 2021Article
- The Abscopal Effect: Could a Phenomenon Described Decades Ago Become Key to Enhancing the Response to Immune Therapies in Breast Cancer?Breast care (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Review
- Radiation Therapy as a Modality to Create Abscopal Effects: Current and Future Practices.Cureus · 2020Review
- Saving the Breast Saves the Lives of Breast Cancer Patients.International journal of surgical oncology · 2020Article
- Is Breast-Conserving Therapy Appropriate for Male Breast Cancer Patients? A National Cancer Database Analysis.Annals of surgical oncology · 2019Article
- Which target volume should be considered when irradiating the regional nodes in breast cancer? Results of a network-meta-analysis.Radiation oncology (London, England) · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Radiotherapy is an integral component of loco-regional therapy for breast cancer. Randomized controlled trials indicate that increasing the extent of extirpative surgery primarily reduces the risk of local recurrences, while the addition of radiotherapy to surgery can also reduce the risk of distant recurrences, thereby lowering breast cancer-specific mortality. This may suggest an "abscopal" effect beyond the immediate zone of loco-regional irradiation that favorably perturbs the natural history of distant micrometastases. Immunological phenomena such as "immunogenic cell death" provide a plausible mechanistic link between the local and systemic effects of radiation. Radiotherapy treatment can stimulate both pro-immunogenic and immunosuppressive pathways with a potential net beneficial effect on anti-tumor immune activity. Upregulation of programmed cell death ligand (PD-L1) by radiotherapy is an immunosuppressive pathway that could be approached with anti-PD-L1 therapy with potential further improvement in survival. The world overview of randomized trials indicates that the breast cancer mortality reduction from adjuvant radiotherapy is delayed relative to that of adjuvant systemic treatments, and similar delays in the separation of survival curves are evident in the majority of randomized immunotherapy trials demonstrating treatment efficacy. In this article, we hypothesize that an abscopal effect may explain the benefit of radiotherapy in reducing breast cancer mortality, and that It might be possible to harness and augment this effect with systemic agents to reduce the risk of late recurrences.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.