Chicago: Chemotherapy helps improve breast cancer survival in post-menopausal women, adding to a long-standing debate about how best to treat these women, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
A gene-based test called Oncotype DX made by Genomic Health Inc may help identify a small group of women who are not likely to benefit from chemotherapy, a second study found.
The main study proves that adding chemotherapy to treatment with the estrogen-blocking drug tamoxifen can help prevent cancer from coming back in women with estrogen-receptor positive breast cancers, the most common kind in which a hormone is driving the cancer.
"We have a survival benefit that lasts for a very long time ... for women who got both modalities of treatment versus women who just got tamoxifen," said Dr. Kathy Albain of Loyola University Health System in Maywood, Illinois.
She presented findings from both studies at the American Association for Cancer Research San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.
"It is considered a landmark study in the clinical trials literature because it is the only one really demonstrating the survival advantage of chemotherapy added to tamoxifen," Albain said in a telephone interview.
"Up until this trial, studies adding common chemotherapy drugs to tamoxifen or tamoxifen alone were essentially negative."For the study, the team followed nearly 1,500 post-menopausal women with estrogen-receptor positive breast cancers that had spread to at least one lymph node.
PTI