Survival rates of recurrent breast cancer patients improving

Main Category: Cancer / Oncology
Article Date: 01 Feb 2004 - 0:00 PDT


Although a recurrence of breast cancer is discouraging, it isn't the death sentence it once was, according to researchers from M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston (USA).

They found that with the introduction of new drugs, the survival of women with recurrent breast cancer has improved by about 1% a year since 1974.

They reported their findings in the journal Cancer (Vol. 100, No. 1: 44-52).

The researchers reviewed the records of 834 women who had been treated for breast cancer at M. D. Anderson since 1974.

All of the women had received chemotherapy after surgery, but had developed a recurrence of their cancer despite that treatment. The women were divided into 5 groups according to their recurrence date: 1974-1979, 1980-1984, 1985-1989, 1990-1994 and 1995-2000.

In each succeeding period, survival improved. In the 1974-79 time period, only 10% of the women lived 5 years. But by the 1995-2000 period, the 5-year survival rate had risen to 44%.

Although these numbers are encouraging, there were some qualifications attached. Each group differed somewhat in where the first recurrence showed up, and that could affect survival rates.

For example, women whose first recurrence was found in lymph nodes or on the skin had a better outcome than women whose cancer came back in the liver or lung. And, more women in the earlier years had liver and lung recurrences and fewer skin or lymph node recurrences.

Better Drugs May Make the Difference

Still, the researchers felt that this difference alone couldn't explain their good results. Instead, they pointed to the explosion in new drugs to treat breast cancer. In the 1970s, only 7 drugs were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (news - web sites) to treat breast cancer. In the 1990s this number had risen to 25.

Examples of newer drugs include the taxanes such as paclitaxel (Taxol) and docetaxel (Taxotere); aromatase inhibitors such as anastrozole (Arimidex), letrozole (Femara) and exemestane (Aromasin); and the anti-HER2 protein drug, trastuzumab (Herceptin).

'Improvement in survival over time would suggest that? new therapies are helping women with recurrent disease live longer,' they wrote.

The researchers couldn't prove conclusively that the new drugs are the primary reason women with recurrent breast cancer are surviving longer. Better diagnostic tools that allow recurrences to be found earlier may also play a role, for instance. More studies are needed to determine just how much of an effect the new treatments have had, they said.

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