Breast-cancer analysis reports long-term cure
Published: May 13, 2005
Chemotherapy and hormone treatment dramatically have reduced the death rate from breast cancer detected early, according to a major international analysis that indicates the often-arduous regimes do cure many women.
Latest data from an enormous, ongoing project involving 145,000 women with early-stage breast cancer found that chemotherapy and hormone treatment continue to protect many women from dying from the disease for at least 15 years. The protection often gets stronger over time, increasing the likelihood that the therapy is truly eradicating cancer from their bodies.
The findings provide the most convincing support yet for using aggressive strategies against the most common malignancy to strike women, and they help explain why the death rate from breast cancer has been dropping in many countries, including the United States and Britain, experts said.
“This is really good news,” said Sarah Darby of the University of Oxford in England, who led the analysis being reported in the May 14 issue of the British journal Lancet.
“It means that the standard therapies we’re giving women really are working,” she added. “It’s really quite exciting.”
The new findings should alleviate lingering doubts, reassuring women who went through the sometimes-grueling regimens that they were worthwhile.
It also should encourage women who are not receiving such treatment to do so, Darby and others said.
“A lot of women out there are not getting these treatments and could benefit from them,” Darby said.
“They are not a magic bullet, but as these data show, they clearly do offer substantial benefit.”
The study also offers long-sought confirmation that follow-up therapies are enabling more women to survive the disease and not just holding the cancer at bay, Darby and other experts said.
Because breast-cancer therapies have evolved since the studies in the analysis were conducted, survival rates may be even better now, the researchers said.
They noted that much more work still is needed to prevent breast cancer, to develop treatments tailored to women’s cancers and to find better ways to predict an individual’s prognosis.
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