Contralateral axillary metastases from the breast cancer. Personal experience and review of the literature

Abstract

The contralateral axillary lymph node metastasis (CAM) from breast cancer are very rare, and pose a number of classification problems and therefore also on the surgery attitude to be adopted and the subsequent surgical oncological approach, making a distinction between synchronous and metachronous cases.

You must always wait for a reasonable period of time to exclude the presence of an occult cancer in the contralateral breast.

You make assumptions about the lymphatic pathways that determine this metastasis underlining that in the literature (rare) cases are reported in which the lymphoscintigraphic sentinel lymph node search has shown an uptake of contralateral axillary lymph nodes.