Another study has found that using high doses of chemotherapy to treat women with breast cancer saves no more lives than a gentler approach, British researchers said Tuesday.
The report, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, adds to evidence that flooding a patient’s body with toxic chemicals and then using a bone marrow transplant to restore her immune system does little to save her life.
But it is bad news for men and women whose breast cancer has spread, because it shows how difficult it is to cure them.
“Approximately two-thirds of patients with four or more lymph nodes that contain cancer cells at surgery will develop fatal metastases,” Dr. Robert Leonard, of the South West Wales Cancer Institute in Swansea, Britain, and colleagues wrote.
Chemotherapy can help. “Although cure is rare, survival is increased by more than one or two years,” they added.
The hope was that super-high doses of chemo could kill off the cancer, and that the patient’s dead bone marrow could be replaced with a transplant of their own cells taken before treatment.
To test this idea, Leonard’s team randomly treated 600 breast cancer patients with either the high-dose approach or a more conventional course of chemotherapy.
The patients were followed for about six years.
There were no differences between the two groups in either relapse or survival. “There were five treatment-related deaths in the high-dose arm,” the researchers added.
Their conclusion — high-dose chemo costs more, makes patients sicker but does not help them any more than the standard approach.
Last year, Dr. Martin Tallman of Northwestern University in Chicago and colleagues and a team in the Netherlands published two studies that also found the high-dose approach to be more toxic without saving any extra lives.
