Letter comments on: The impact of isolated local recurrence on long-term outcome in early-breast cancer patients after breast-conserving therapy

We congratulate Vrieling C et al. [1] on their publication, which investigated the impact of ipsilateral breast tumour recurrence (IBTR) on oncological outcomes after breast conservative treatment in early breast cancer. The study population was derived from two European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer randomised trials (22881-10882 ‘boost-no boost’ and 22922-10925 ‘IM-MS’). Among the 8367 patients analysed in the whole cohort, 726 experienced an isolated IBTR. The authors showed that patients who presented an IBTR had a higher risk of developing distant metastases, whereas an earlier IBTR (short time interval between the first and second breast tumour event — TI1/2) leads to a significantly higher risk of breast cancer-related death.