New findings show that adjuvant treatments prevent late relapses in breast cancer patients. Breast cancer is an unusual disease because it can come back ten or fifteen years later. The new findings show that a lot of these late recurrences can be prevented by adjuvant* treatment with radiotherapy, chemotherapy and, in particular, the hormone treatment tamoxifen.
"This is the first time we've had good evidence on the effects of treatment on 15 year survival", said Sir Richard Peto, Professor of Medical Statistics at the University of Oxford, UK. He told the 2nd European Breast Cancer Conference today (Wednesday 27 September): "These results, from a worldwide overview of 300 randomised trials, that included around 200 000 patients, are a lot better than we expected. It seems that we can at last talk about real cure", he said.
"The best evidence on the extent to which better treatment is saving lives is from the UK, where tamoxifen was widely used from the 1980s, and where deaths from breast cancer in middle-aged women have fallen by 30% over the past decade. It seems as though several other European countries are now beginning to follow in the same direction."
The next worldwide overview, in five years time, will show whether these survival gains are still being maintained.
* treatment given in addition to surgery