Role of Surgery in Metastatic Breast Cancer and Its Justification

Breast cancer has taken over lung cancer to be the most common cancer worldwide, accounting for 11.7% of all cancer cases and 6.9% of all cancer deaths [1]. According to the GLOBOCAN 2020 data, breast cancer accounts for 1 in 4 cases of cancer among women and 1 in 6 cases of death due to cancer [1]. It is estimated that 20–30% of females with breast cancer will develop metastasis in a synchronous or a metachronous fashion [2]. And 6% of the patients present with metastatic breast cancer (MBC) at the time of initial diagnosis [3, 4]. MBC is essentially a treatable but incurable disease, hence the survival rates are poor. But with the myriad of effective treatment modalities, the women with MBC live longer as compared to the previous times. This increased survival means that there are new issues of quality of life including the local symptoms. This leads the difficult question that the authors are going to address through the means of this chapter, what is the role of surgery for the primary tumour in MBC?