Introduction:

Breast cancer is one of the most frequent malignant tumors in women; in Paraguay it has a high mortality. Neoadjuvant chemotherapy was introduced to reduce the size of the tumor and make resectables the tumors considered unresectables, allowing to perform conservative surgeries and test the sensitivity to chemotherapy.

Material and methods:

Descriptive study, transverse, retrospective and with analytical component. Sample: 130 patients with breast cancer who received neoadjuvant treatment in the Department of Medical Oncology of Hospital de Clínicas FCM-UNA from 2010 to 2016. Variables: age, sex, biological types, histological grade, histological type, lymphovascular permeation, clinical stage, clinical response, pathological response in the tumor (T) and pathological response in the armpit (N). The sampling was non-probabilistic due to the convenience of consecutive cases. Mean, frequency, and χ2 were used.

Results:

according to RECIST (Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors) 1.1 criteria, a higher frequency of partial response was found in 43.85%, and according to Sataloff criteria for pathological response of T tumor, the highest frequency was T-C, in 37.5%. Pathological response in the armpit N increased frequency of N-D in 36.46%. The most frequent biological type was luminal A, in 31.54%. In all molecular phenotypes, higher rates of pathological response in the breast compared to those in the axilla were observed. Rate of clinical and pathological response in breast T was statistically significant depending on whether the treatment was complete or not (p < 0.05).

Conclusion:

Pathological response in the breast was greater than that found in the axilla. The HER2+ and the triple negative molecular subtypes had a higher response rate than the luminal.

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