October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, an annual campaign to raise awareness about the impact of breast cancer.
Dr. Sara Hurvitz at UCLA has brought to light the impact of medicine to fight breast cancer. Anthracycline medications, such as Adriamycin (doxorubicin), have been routinely used in breast cancer treatment since the 1970s, despite serious and life-threatening potential side effects including heart failure and leukemia.
Dr. Hurvitz says the evidence suggests newer drugs are often just as effective and with fewer risks. She is the director of the Breast Cancer Clinical Research Program at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.
On October 8th, Dr. Hurvitz and others published a paper in the Science journal, Nature (Nature.com) called “A Careful Reassessment of anthracycline use in curable breast cancer.”
Dr. Hurvitz and her colleagues have concluded the following: there has been no prospective randomized trial that has demonstrated an OS benefit from the addition of anthracyclines to taxane-based chemotherapy in the curative setting. Although HER2 amplification was thought to indicate a tumor subtype that would benefit from the addition of an anthracycline in an era that predated trastuzumab, no randomized study has shown the addition of anthracycline to a taxane/trastuzumab-based regimen improves outcomes for HER2-amplified breast cancer. As we select patients whose disease burden warrants the incorporation of an anthracycline into their regimen, we must also consider carefully that the potential life-altering toxicities associated with anthracyclines are real and are likely underreported. Thus, rather than asking which patients can be safely be treated without an anthracycline, we should be asking, does the data clearly exist to warrant the use of an anthracycline, keeping in mind that in many cases we are potentially harming patients more than helping them.
For more information visit: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41523-021-00342-5
As women unite to discuss breast cancer it is important to share research, data, ideas, and therapies with each other. To read more about Breast Cancer Awareness, visit: