Women with Advanced Cancer Living Longer
Posted 4/2/2011
Posted in
This is terrific news that supports what I see in my office everyday. When I first began to work in Oncology, there was exactly one available treatment (Adriamycin) for metastatic breast cancer. When it stopped working, there was nothing else to offer. There is now a long list of available treatments, and the possibilities increase every year. Even more importantly, the advent of targeted therapies means that individuals can receive drugs that will be effective for their particular tumor--and, just as important, others who would not be helped can be spared those treatments.
This is from BMC Cancer and is a study from Japan:
Significant survival improvement of patients with recurrent breast cancer in the periods 2001-2008 vs. 1992-2000
Hideo Shigematsu , Hidetoshi Kawaguchi , Yoshiaki Nakamura , Kimihiro Tanaka , Satoko Shiotani , Chinami Koga , Sumiko Nishimura , Kenichi Taguchi , Kenichi Nishiyama and Sinji Ohno
BMC Cancer 2011, 11:118 doi:10.1186/1471-2407-11-118 Published: 31 March 2011
Background
It is unclear whether individualized treatments based on biological factors have improved the prognosis of recurrent breast cancer. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the survival improvement of patients with recurrent breast cancer after the introduction of third generation aromatase inhibitors (AIs) and trastuzumab.
Methods
A total of 407 patients who received first diagnosis of recurrent breast cancer and treatment at National Kyushu Cancer Center between 1992 and 2008 were retrospectively evaluated. As AIs and trastuzumab were approved for clinical use in Japan in 2001, the patients were divided into two time cohorts depending on whether the cancer recurred before or after 2001. Cohort A: 170 patients who were diagnosed between 1992 and 2000. Cohort B: 237 patients who were diagnosed between 2001 and 2008. Tumor characteristics, treatments, and outcome were compared.
Results
Fourteen percent of cohort A and 76% of cohort B received AIs and/or trastuzumab (P < 0.001). The median overall survival (OS) times after breast cancer recurrence were 1.7 years and 4.2 years for these respective cohorts (P < 0.001). Both the time period and treatment of AIs and/or trastuzumab for recurrent disease were significant prognostic factors in multivariate analysis (cohort B vs. cohort A: HR = 0.70, P = 0.01; AIs and/or trastuzumab for recurrent disease: yes vs. no: HR = 0.46, P < 0.001). When patients were categorized into 4 subgroups by the expression of hormone receptor (HR) and HER-2 status, the median OS times of the HR-positive / HER-2-negative, HR-positive / HER-2-positive, HR-negative / HER-2-positive, and HR-negative / HER-2-negative subtypes were 2.2, 2.4, 1.6, and 1.0 years in cohort A and 4.5, 5.1, 5.0, and 1.4 years in cohort B.
Conclusions
The prognosis of patients with recurrent breast cancer was improved over time following the introduction of AIs and trastuzumab and the survival improvement was apparent in HR- and/or HER-2-positive tumors.
Tags: