Adjuvant therapy of breast cancer

✍ Scribed by Nancy E. Davidson; Martin D. Abeloff

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1994
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 605 KB
• Volume: 18
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0364-2313
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00348200

✦ Synopsis

About 180,000 American women will be diagnosed with early stage breast cancer during 1993. In many of these patients breast cancer is a systemic disease at diagnosis and thus not curable by local treatment alone. The development of optimal forms of systemic adjuvant therapy has been a major area of research for more than 30 years. The two most widely employed types of adjuvant therapy, cytotoxic chemotherapy and tamoxifen, have been shown to improve relapse-free and overall survival in certain patient subsets. This review highlights recent advances in adjuvant therapy of early stage breast cancer and discusses current treatment guidelines.

Of the estimated 182,000 women who will be found to have breast cancer in 1993. more than 80% will initially present with disease clinically limited to the breast and axillary lymph nodes. Unfortunately, nearly one-half of those women will later develop and likely die of metastatic disease. Through most of the twentieth century breast cancer was believed to be a locoregional disease best managed by extensive surgery. It is now accepted, however, that breast cancer is a systemic disease at diagnosis in many patients and therefore not curable by local treatment. Thus there has been marked interest in the development of effective forms of systemic adjuvant therapy whose goal is to eradicate micrometastases and thereby improve both relapse-free and overall survival.

The two most widely studied types of adjuvant therapy are those that involve cytotoxic drug(s) or the synthetic antiestrogen tamoxifen. This review highlights the lessons learned from selected individual adjuvant trials using these two modalities as well as the overview analysis of the Early Breast Cancer