Responsiveness to endocrine manipulations in breast cancer after "prophylactic" castration.

Two hundred and one cases of premenopausal women with breast cancer who underwent prophylactic castration with subsequent recurrence were review to ascertain the degree of responsiveness of these patients to subsequent endocrine manipulation. We show that the standard endocrine manipulations, particularly the major ablations, retain a fair degree of activity in this group. There is a suggestion that the longer the castration-recurrence interval, the higher the chance of a response, but the difference is significant only for osseous-dominant disease. As in other patient groups, responders to subsequent endocrine manipulations live longer than nonresponders.