ER/PR+ tends to metastasize in three rather than five years?

Honestly I have not heard this. Maybe others who are more knowledgeable will chime in.

I have heard that this type of cancer tends to recur within 3 years.

Are you talking specifically about metastatic recurrence or any recurrence?

There was a long term study on recurrence published in 2016. Biggest risk is in first 5 years for both ER+ and ER-.

ER- tends to recur early in the 5 yrs; ER+ risk of recurrence seems to stay pretty steady for ever

"Patients with ER-positive breast cancer maintain a significant recurrence rate during extended follow up. Strategies for follow up and treatments to prevent recurrences may be most efficiently applied and studied in patients with ER-positive disease followed for a long period of time."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26786933

My MO said triple negative tends to have the most risk the first 2 years, with up to 5 years quite risky. Thereafter it tends to go down dramatically for triple negative. The positive cancers are also at the most risk the first 5 years, but that risk is lower than for triple negative. The risk of recurrence doesn't go down as much after 5 years as it does for triple negative, but then it's not as high to begin with.

I have recently read that er+ and pr- may behave more like triple negative in regards to recurrence. Not sure there is enough data to substantiate this. Especially high er+ and pr absence. Still alot to learn.

But every year that goes by without recurrence is a positive outlook for the future.

Lita, that sounds like article I read. That the progestrone receptors help dial back the estrogen therefore putting the brakes on.

There's nothing magic about 3 years or 5 years for ER+ breast cancer. That's a misunderstanding that may have originally been propagated by the use of 5-year survival as a measure of success of a treatment in clinical trials. The risk of recurrence for ER+ breast cancer appears never to go to zero.

This is an approximation (because cancers can be complicated and can be mixtures of aggressive and less-aggressive cell populations), but it's a useful concept. With cancer in general, aggressive (fast-growing) cancers tend to recur faster than indolent (slow-growing) ones, but after a certain amount of time it's the indolent ones that are more likely to recur. If you think about it, that makes sense. If a person had a very aggressive cancer and has made it (I'm picking a random number here, so as not to bring in the "3" and "5" thing) 17 years, it's highly unlikely that the cancer will return because, being fast growing, it would have made its presence known much earlier if there were any of it left. A tiny amount of slow-growing, indolent cancer could hang around for that long without being noticed. So if a person has a cancer recur many years later, it suggests that the original cancer was slow-growing.

What the take home from this is that because your BS made a statement that they think your cancer, if it recurs would be more likely to recur earlier, it means that for some reason your BS thinks that you had a fast growing tumor. That seems a little odd looking at your Dx specifics, which don't suggest something aggressive. But overall, it's kind of an odd thing to say anyway since ER+ cancer just hit the news in a major NEJM paper last year showing disappointingly measurable recurrence rates as far out as 20 years after stopping endocrine therapy http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1701830, and the authors comment even in the abstract that recurrences occurred "steadily" throughout the follow-up time period. Of course, that doesn't predict any one person's risk because each individual has factors that make their cancer more or less aggressive, but it does tell us that for ER+ cancer as a whole group, there is no finish line where you can be sure you're done with it. So even if your BS does think you had an aggressive cancer, why they mentioned 5 years as a comparison is a mystery.

Honestly, if you want to know about your risk for recurrence, you should talk to a breast oncologist, not the surgeon.

The posts on reoccurrence has been informative.

Thanks for sharing.