Real-Life Use of Adjuvant Trastuzumab in Early Breast Cancer

the Cancer Therapy Advisor take:

Effectiveness of adjuvant trastuzumab in patients with early-stage HER2-positive breast cancer in real life is comparable to randomized clinical trials, according to an article published online in the journal The Oncologist.

Participants of this study included patients with stage I through III invasive breast cancer (diagnosed between 2005 and 2007) from five hospitals in the southeast of The Netherlands.

Results showed that 476 patients out of 2,684 (17.7%) had a HER2-positive malignant tumor.  Although 251 (52.7%) of these patients had an indication for treatment with trastuzumab, only 196 (78.1%) actually received the treatment.

Patients treated with trastuzumab had a 5-year disease-free survival of 80.7% (n = 230) compared with a five-year disease-free survival of 68.2% (n = 246) for patients not treated with trastuzumab (P = 0.0023).

The five-year overall survival rate for the trastuzumab cohort was 90.7% versus 77.4% for the patients not treated with trastuzumab.

After adjusting for confounders, the hazard ratio for recurrence was 0.63 (95% CI: 0.37, 1.06) for trastuzumab.

The study suggests that real-life studies be considered when introducing new drugs because they can provide further insight into specific patient groups that may not be found in randomized trials.