Real-World Evidence: How It Helps to Understand Breast Cancer Treatment

After being diagnosed with breast cancer, there are a lot of important decisions to make. 

Discussing your treatment plan with your doctors can feel overwhelming. 

Learning about breast cancer research can help you better understand your options and feel informed about your decisions. 

You can ask your doctors about different types of research on any medicines you may receive. 

Clinical trials are research studies that investigate whether a new cancer treatment is safe and effective. 

They may also look to see if the treatment being studied works better than medicines that are currently available. 

Your healthcare team can tell you if there are clinical trial results about the medicines recommended for you. 

You can also ask your doctor about real-world evidence. 

Real-world evidence comes from the analysis of real-world data, which is information about how well a medicine works for people after it is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. 

While clinical trials are considered the gold standard for studying a treatment, they often do not reflect the diversity of the people who have been diagnosed with a disease. 

Real-world evidence may provide additional information about treatments by including the experiences of people not well represented in clinical trials, such as marginalized groups, elderly people, those with heart disease, and others. 

Doctors can learn more about how a treatment works when they look at real-world evidence alongside clinical trial data, but real-world evidence can't be used on its own to evaluate a medicine. 

By asking your doctor about both clinical trial results and real-world evidence, you’re empowering yourself to make more informed decisions with your healthcare team.