text_1: Early breast cancers may need less lymph node surgery
text_2: Improved quality of life, with no reduction in survival. This story hits the high points of an important study looking at overall survival in some breast cancer patients who face lymph node dissection of multiple nodes with its not infrequent life-long complications. Strong points:  emphasized this finding applied only to “some” women even in first sentence then later emphasized “the findings apply to only a small number of breast cancer patients” mentioned that results had been presented at a medical conference last summer and that “some surgeons are already changing their practices”  Areas for improvement:  could have discussed impacts on cost and on insurance decisions discuss the possible limitations to the research that the authors mentioned tell readers how often complications occur from axillary lymph node dissection and from sentinel node approach   Until now, if a patient has a positive node on a sentinel node biospy they then have additional lymph node surgery. Based on this study, which suggests there is no overall  or disease-free survival benefit to  ALND for the patients named above, there would be no reason for them to go through the additional suffering that often accompanies the procedure.