Chemo may aid older breast cancer patients

Women 65 and older with breast cancer should consider chemotherapy even though doctors have been reluctant to use it in that age group because of the side effects, researchers say.

Doctors at the Vermont Cancer Center in Burlington analyzed cases between 1975 and 1999 and found that otherwise “healthy older patients are likely to derive similar treatment benefits as younger patients” from chemotherapy.

The older group had “the same lowering of their relapse rate, and the same lowering of their breast cancer mortality rate, by being on a higher-dose therapy,” said Dr. Hyman Muss, who headed the study published in the March 2 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

Nearly half of all new breast cancer cases in the United States occur in women 65 or older, the report said. But data, it added, suggest that chemotherapy may be underused in older patients or done at reduced doses that decrease its effectiveness.