Follow-up after breast cancer treatment

Follow-up after your initial treatment has finished is co-ordinated between the specialists who have treated you and is tailored to your level of risk of the cancer coming back. Recurrence of the cancer can be either in the breast or local lymph nodes (local recurrence) or elsewhere in the body (metastatic disease). The risk is generally greatest in the first few years after diagnosis and tapers off with time. A general scheme of follow-up is to have checkups every 3 months for the first 2 years and then every 6 months for the following 3 years. You also have a slightly increased risk of developing a new breast cancer, which may occur in any remaining breast tissue and will not necessarily be related to the cancer you have been treated for. For this reason you will usually be advised to have imaging of any remaining breast tissue each year, usually with both mammography and ultrasound.

There are not usually other “routine” tests to be done, and any additional investigations are tailored to any symptoms you might have at follow-up and the type of drug treatment you may have received or be taking.