Neo-Adjuvant chemotherapy in breast cancer Study of 477 evaluable patients with primary breast cancers treated between 1980 and 1992

Neo-Adjuvant chemotherapy in breast cancer means that chemotherapy is used as the first therapeutic tool and that the locoregional treatment is considered as an adjuvant. The term has been contested and others were proposed, but induction treatment is too specific for the first chemotherapy combination used in leukemia to achieve complete remission. Primary treatment does not encompass the consolidation phase which belongs to our strategy so that even if it is not quite satisfactory we keep the term Neo-Adjuvant which has been coined in the seventies by E. Frei for head and neck cancers.