Abstract
Multiple aspects of the management of metastatic breast cancer need improvement. Patients are anxious about their risk of recurrence and are disappointed at the lack of reliable tests for the early detection of recurrence, even though there are no data to suggest that detection of asymptomatic recurrences a few weeks or months earlier is of any benefit. It seems reasonable that identifying resistance to a new therapy and progression of disease at the earliest moment would avoid needless toxic effects of therapies doomed to fail and would permit earlier initiation of other potential therapies. Finally, the means of estimating overall . . .
