Drugs Help Cancer Surgery Survival, Study Finds
Researchers reported Thursday that powerful anti-cancer drugs along with breast cancer surgery can delay relapse and increase survival rates over surgery alone.
The finding should settle a dispute among doctors over whether chemotherapy provides additional benefits once the tumor is removed, said Dr. Thomas Chalmers of Harvard and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
“Doctors hate to do things to patients which make them uncomfortable,” Chalmers said. “And, in the case of chemotherapy, there are a lot of side effects, from hair loss to nausea to vomiting, and so doctors want to be sure they’re doing their patient some good.
“It’s still a judgment issue,” he said. “But I think I would give it to my wife on this basis.”
Survival Rates Improve
The Harvard School of Public Health, pooling data from nearly 10,000 patients, found that relapse-free survival rates of operable breast cancer were 12.5% better at three years when chemotherapy was given in addition to surgery.
The American Cancer Society estimates that 123,000 new cases of breast cancer will be diagnosed in the United States this year and that one of every 11 American women will develop the disease sometime.
Chalmers said questions about whether chemotherapy is an effective aid to cancer surgery have arisen because many studies on the subject have not included enough patients to provide scientifically valid results.
‘Still a Lot of Studies’
“Many people often make the mistake that, because an effect is not statistically significant, it’s not there,” he said. “But there’s still a lot of studies unpublished and cooking, and those unpublished studies confirmed what we found. That the effect is there.”
The Harvard researchers combined results from 28 studies published during the last 30 years, then analyzed them together. Their results were reported in Friday’s Journal of the American Medical Assn.
