Cancer Is Cut by an Aggressive Regimen

Chemotherapy and hormone treatment have sharply reduced the death rate from early breast cancer, according to a major international analysis that indicates the often-arduous regimes do cure many women.

The latest data from an ongoing project involving 145,000 women with early breast cancer found that chemotherapy and hormone treatment continued to protect many women from dying from the disease for at least 15 years. The protection often gets stronger over time, increasing the likelihood that the therapy is truly eradicating cancer from their bodies.

The findings provide the most convincing support yet for using aggressive strategies against the most common malignancy to strike women, and they help explain why the breast cancer death rate has been dropping in many countries, including the U.S. and Britain, experts said.

“This is really good news,” said Sarah Darby of the University of Oxford in England, who led the analysis being reported in the May 14 issue of the journal the Lancet. “It means that the standard therapies we’re giving women really are working. It’s really quite exciting.”

The analysis showed, for example, that a middle-aged woman with a diagnosis of early-stage breast cancer cut her risk of dying by about half by undergoing six months of chemotherapy and taking hormone treatment for five years, if she was medically eligible for both.

Every year, about 211,240 women in the U.S. have breast cancer diagnosed and about 40,410 die from the disease, making it the most common cancer among women and second leading cancer killer, after lung cancer.

For most women, it is standard practice to treat early breast cancer with surgery and radiation, followed by chemotherapy to reduce the risk of a recurrence by wiping out cancer cells elsewhere in the body. If their tumors are sensitive to the hormone estrogen, many women also take the estrogen-blocking drug tamoxifen for about five years to further reduce the risk of recurrence. (A new generation of hormone therapy has begun to replace tamoxifen.)

Although earlier studies have shown that the approach reduced the chances of a relapse and increased the odds of survival, there have been haunting concerns about how long those benefits last inasmuch as breast cancer has a knack for hiding in the body for years or even decades before reemerging.

The new findings should alleviate lingering doubts, reassuring women who went through the regimens and encouraging women who are not receiving such treatment to do so, Darby and others said.