Breast cancer is the most common malignancy among women in the United States and is second only to lung cancer as the most common cause of cancer-related mortality. In 2000, it is…

Historically, adjuvant chemotherapy has been tested in combination regimens, in which one multiagent regimen is cycled over time to allow recovery of normal tissues (in particular, hematologic recovery). The doses of each…

In order to decide which patients will benefit from the addition of adjuvant therapy, it is important to assess each woman’s risk of developing recurrent disease. Competing comorbid conditions…

The investigation of high-dose chemotherapy for the treatment of women with breast cancer was supported by laboratory findings that suggested a dose-response relationship for alkylating agents.

Medical advances…

In the chemotherapy overview analysis, 11 trials included women who were randomized to receive CMF versus an anthracycline-containing regimen (either doxorubicin or, in European trials, epirubicin). There was…

In a similar fashion to tamoxifen, the EBCTCG performed an overview of the worldwide randomized data for the use of adjuvant chemotherapy in early-stage breast cancer (almost 18,000 women randomized in 47…

Ovarian ablation is among the oldest treatments for metastatic breast cancer. Beatson first described the method in 1896 when he reported the dramatic shrinkage of tumor in three women with locally advanced disease.

Surgical oophorectomy…

Women randomized to 5 years of tamoxifen in the overview analysis were found to have a 47% (SD 9) reduction in the risk of…

The largest group of women in the 1995 analysis included almost 37,000 women randomized in 55 trials, all of which were designed to look at whether tamoxifen was an active agent in the…