Year saw strides against breast cancer

ROCHESTER, Minn., Dec. 30 (UPI) -- This year was a productive one for therapeutic advances against breast cancer, the Mayo Clinic said Friday.

The results of several clinical trials established the value of two types of breast-cancer drugs in preventing the disease's recurrence, significantly improving disease-free survival rates, the medical center said.

Specifically, in two large clinical trials, trastuzumab (Herceptin), used to treat women with advanced breast cancer, was found to help women with early-stage HER-2 positive breast cancer -- an aggressive form of the disease that tends to respond poorly to hormone treatment, the Mayo Clinic said.

In fact, women with early-stage HER-2 positive breast cancer who received Herceptin in combination with standard chemotherapy had a 52-percent reduction in breast-cancer recurrence when compared with women receiving chemotherapy alone.

Other studies published this year showed aromatase inhibitors (AIs) are an effective hormone treatment for postmenopausal women with hormone-positive early-stage breast cancer, the Mayo Clinic added.

That finding is a major breakthrough, the center said, because for at least two decades, the drug tamoxifen has been the gold standard add-on therapy used after initial treatment. Recent clinical trials have shown that AIs, which block an enzyme that produces small amounts of estrogen in postmenopausal women, often show better disease-free survival rates than does tamoxifen alone or when used after several years of tamoxifen or as a first-line therapy for early-stage breast cancer, the Mayo Clinic said.