Surgical Clinics of North America Volume 87, Issue 2 , Pages xix-xx, April 2007 This issue of the Surgical Clinics of North America is dedicated to surgical trainees at the level of house officers and fellows. The evaluation and management of both benign and malignant diseases of the breast are likely to demand a substantial fraction of a general surgeon's practice, yet general surgery residents frequently receive their breast pathology education in a fragmented fashion. Exposure to outpatient clinics and office-based management (where much of the decision-making processes in breast cancer take place) is limited, and surgical breast procedures are often assigned to junior trainees, who do not necessarily understand the subtle judgment that is required in planning incisions, skin flaps, and extent of breast resections. The surgical chief resident must finish his/her training program with the requisite number of breast procedures documented in their case log, but the majority of them may have been performed during the first half of the residency, and there may have been very little exposure to considerations regarding neoadjuvant therapy versus postoperative adjuvant therapy, postmastectomy radiation, and breast cancer risk reduction. Our goal was to develop a collection of articles that cover essential areas of surgical as well as nonsurgical breast cancer management. We have therefore compiled 18 articles that focus on several important aspects of breast disease management; most of the articles have been coauthored by surgery trainees so that resident-level perspectives are provided. These articles can be categorized in general as having an emphasis on one of the following areas: (1) contemporary surgical treatment strategies (eg, lymphatic mapping and breast reconstruction); (2) new systemic therapy strategies (adjuvant and neoadjuvant); (3) breast cancer risk reduction (surgical and medical); and (4) novel research directions that trainees should consider (eg, disparity-related research and breast tumor ablation techniques).

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