New Hope For Patients With Advanced Breast Cancer

There may be new hope for the patients that have advanced breast cancer. Researchers have found the use of trastuzumab, chemotherapy and surgery tremendously improves survival and the time central nervous system metastases is diagnosed among patients who are suffering from HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer.

About 10 % - 16 percent of women who have advanced breast cancer develop metastasis to central nervous system, which means the cancer spreads to the brain.

Within this research, 377 of the 1,023 women newly-diagnosed that have had HER2-positive breast cancer had central nervous system metastases. These patients were younger and more likely to have hormone receptor-negative disease and higher disease burden combining with those whose cancer didn't spread to the brain.

For those who diagnosed with central nervous system metastases, treatment with trastuzumab, chemo, and surgery was each connected with an improvement in survival: trastuzumab, 17.5 months vs. no trastuzumab, 3.8 months; chemotherapy, 16.4 months vs. no chemotherapy, 3.7 months; and surgery, 20.3 months vs. no surgery, 11.3 months.

"We obviously now know that these women should get trastuzumab and potentially chemotherapy, even though cancer spreads to the brain," lead researcher Adam Brufsky, M.D., Ph.D., was quoted as saying. "Women with HER2-positive breast cancer have a reasonable chance of living a long time with their disease, and they should be given aggressive therapy where appropriate."

The researchers say they are surprised that chemotherapy/trastuzumab increases the patients' survival. They had thought that that brain metastases would be dominant whatever therapy was used.

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