Getting the best breast cancer treatment can feel like a balancing act: you want to do as much as you can to get rid of the cancer and lower the risk of it coming back. But you'd like to avoid uncomfortable side effects that might lower your quality of life.
Since breast cancer in younger women tends to be more aggressive and harder to treat, making chemotherapy part of the treatment plan might seem like a good thing to do. Still, the study reviewed here found that chemotherapy offers no real benefits for younger women diagnosed with hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer.
Younger women diagnosed with hormone-receptor-negative breast cancer did benefit from chemotherapy.
The researchers looked at the results of several previous studies to reach their conclusions.
The key to having the best possible outcome for younger women diagnosed with hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer is to reduce the amount estrogen and progesterone in the body. This can be done by:
If you're a younger woman diagnosed with hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer, talk to your doctor about this study. Depending on your unique situation, chemotherapy may still be an important part of your treatment plan. Together, you and your doctor can develop the treatment plan that's best for YOU.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - An analysis of the results of several studies confirm previous reports suggesting that chemotherapy offers little or no survival benefits for young women with estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancers and, if given, it should not be the sole second-phase, or "adjuvant" therapy.
"Developing breast cancer at a young age is very worrying in terms of survival," lead researcher Dr. Jos J. A. van der Hage, from Leiden University in the Netherlands, said in a statement. "But some young women may be undergoing not only unpleasant but also unnecessary chemotherapy."
In the current analysis, the researchers examined data from 480 women with early-stage breast cancer enrolled in one of four EORTC (European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer) trials. All of the subjects were premenopausal -- younger than 40 years of age -- and the average follow-up period was 7.6 years.
During follow-up, 155 patients died or experienced a distant recurrence, according to the report appearing in the current online issue of Breast Cancer Research.
Patients with ER-positive cancers were significantly more likely to have a longer overall survival than those with ER-negative cancers, the team reports.
Among the patients who received prolonged adjuvant chemotherapy, however, the difference in survival rates was minimal (70 percent versus 75 percent, favoring the ER-negative group, and rates of metastasis-free survival were 59 percent versus 70 percent, respectively.
These results suggest that chemotherapy had a beneficial effect for women with ER-negative tumors, but had minimal or no effect on ER-positive cancers.
Similar survival differences were noted for women with or without progesterone receptor-positive tumors, the report indicates.
"Adjuvant chemotherapy is a well established, but ineffective treatment in ER-positive breast cancer patients aged 40 years or less," van der Hage emphasized. "Hormone responsiveness is the key to tailoring therapy in the future fight against this disease for young women."
SOURCE: Breast Cancer Research, October 10, 2007.
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