An additional analysis from the prospective Plan B trial, Europe’s largest contemporary adjuvant breast cancer trial, conducted by the Women’s Healthcare Study Group in Germany, showed a high level of discordance in tumor grade assessment as performed by central and local pathologists.
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Study leader, Dr. Joseph Sparano of Montefiore Medical Center commented, “You can’t do better than that”.
“This is really great news for the patients we’re treating” says Dr. Sharon Giordano, an oncologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, who wasn’t involved in the study.
This finding was published online today by the New England Journal of Medicine. In the USA, breast cancer is the second most common cancer in women after skin cancer, affecting about 230,000 new patients annually. Eighty-nine of kids were exposed to chemotherapy, four to radiotherapy, seven to both chemo- and radiotherapy, one each to drugs trastuzumab and interferon beta, 13 to surgery alone, and 14 had none of the above treatments.
In the 10,000 women, the tumors had not yet spread to the lymph nodes, but had features that generally meant they should be given chemotherapy paired with endocrine therapy pills (like tamoxifen).
Many cancer patients would like to avoid chemotherapy as this isn’t the safest treatment available.
Researchers say the Oncotype DX test may be an effective tool to identify which women with early-stage breast cancer are unlikely to benefit from chemotherapy. The test that measures these factors to determine whether women are low-risk, high-risk, or somewhere in between-called Oncotype DX-has been on the market since 2004.
Pregnant mothers who are hesitant to undergo treatment are understandably cautious for the safety of their unborn, but a new study suggests that they should no longer delay treatment despite bearing a child, Reuters reports.
“Even though they did not get chemotherapy, this large group of women did very well”.
Results showed that prenatal exposure to maternal cancer with or without treatment did not negatively affect cardiac, cognitive, or general development of children in early childhood. They also noted that the five-year overall patient survival was 98 percent.
This standard treatment has lowered death rates among breast cancer patients by more than 33 percent since the 1980s.
“That means we treat patients with less complicated, less toxic-type treatments with less side effects, and still have the same benefits”, Dr. Nagpal said. The European Registration of Cancer Care (EURECCA) study [1] compared the treatment patterns of 119,125 patients aged 70 and older in Belgium, Ireland, The Netherlands, Portugal, Poland and the United Kingdom, [2] who were diagnosed with non-metastatic (stage I, II or III) breast cancer between 2000 and 2014.
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‘My doctor felt strongly that my risk for recurrence without chemo was low and so why burden myself and my body’.
