ArticleThe British journal of surgery2026
Comparing multifocal with unifocal breast cancer and the relationship with survival: national cohort study.
Article in The British journal of surgery, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThe prognostic relevance of multifocal and multicentric breast cancer remains unclear and current staging systems do not consider focality. The aim of this study was to explore whether women with multifocal breast cancer have less favourable tumour characteristics and worse survival compared with women with unifocal breast cancer.
methodsPatient and tumour characteristics were obtained from Breast Cancer Database Sweden 3.0, which includes data for all Swedish women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer between 2008 and 2019 and who underwent surgery. Overall and breast cancer-specific survival rates were calculated using the Kaplan-Meier method and multivariable analysis was used to identify independent predictors of survival using the Cox proportional hazard model.
resultsA total of 71 419 women were included in the study: 59 445 (83.2%) had unifocal breast cancer, 7286 (10.2%) had multifocal breast cancer with two invasive foci, and 4688 (6.6%) had multifocal breast cancer with three or more invasive foci. Multifocal breast cancer was associated with higher clinical T and N categories compared with unifocal breast cancer. The median follow-up time was 5.96 (interquartile range 3.078.80) years. The breast cancer-specific 10-year survival rates were 86.1% for women with multifocal breast cancer with three or more foci, 86.5% for women with multifocal breast cancer with two foci, and 88.4% for women with unifocal breast cancer. In a multivariable analysis adjusted for patient and tumour characteristics, the HR for breast cancer-specific death was 1.17 (95% c.i. 1.03 to 1.32) for women with multifocal breast cancer with three or more foci compared with women with unifocal breast cancer. There was no statistically significant difference in overall survival between the three groups.
conclusionThe present study suggests that focality provides prognostic information that is additional to that provided by traditional tumour characteristics.
Indexed as
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.