Does Anesthesia Technique Affect the Presence of Circulating Tumor Cells in Primary Breast Carcinoma? A Randomised Controlled Trial.

Serious concern about the role of anesthesia in tumor recurrence has considerably risen over years, but the lack of surrogate markers for tumor spreading made trials addressing this issue difficult to realize. However, CTC positivity in breast cancer patients has been recently recognized as an independent prognostic factor and proposed as an early indicator for therapy response. In this respect, we postulated that changes in the proportion of CTC-positive patients before and after general anesthesia would help to determine the effect of anesthesia on tumor recurrence.