Written by Astha Saxena | New Delhi | Updated: June 4, 2019 9:04:12 am Participants at The Pink Run to mark Breast Cancer Month at Sukhna Lake in Chandigarh (Express Photo by Sahil Walia/File)
A recent study led by a group of researchers at the University of
Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has found that adding a drug,
ribociclib, to hormone therapy significantly increased the overall
survival in relatively younger women suffering from advanced breast
cancer.
The study covered women who had not yet reached menopause or were
still going through it. They were suffering from hormone
receptor-positive (HR+) breast cancer and HER2-negative disease. HR+
cancer involves tumours that are receptive to anti-estrogen (endocrine)
treatments aimed at blocking hormones while HER2-negative means that the
patient lacks a protein of that name.
What the study found
Described as “one of the greatest advances in breast cancer in recent
decades”, the study was conducted on 672 pre-menopausal women under age
59 years who had advanced HR+. After 42 months, 70% of the patients
treated with combination therapy were alive as compared to 46% of those
who received only the hormone therapy.
“Younger patients have been a particular concern, because breast
cancer is known to be more aggressive and to be associated with poorer
prognosis in younger women than in older women,” the researchers wrote
in The New England Journal of Medicine, which will publish the article
online on Tuesday, when the results are presented at the annual meeting
of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, in Chicago.
Why it is significant
At the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, almost 35% of
patients diagnosed with HR+ breast cancer and HER2-negative disease are
under age 40. For such women, the standard treatment involved hormonal
treatments such as tamoxifen to premenopausal patients and drugs called
aromatase inhibitors to post-menopausal women.
One in every 28 Indian women — 1 in 22 in urban areas, 1 in 60 in
rural areas — is likely to develop breast cancer during her lifetime.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), breast cancer is the
most frequent cancer among women, impacting 2.1 million women each year,
and also causes the highest number of cancer-related deaths among women
— 6,27,000 or 15% in 2018. In India, breast cancer accounts for 14% of
all cancers in women.
The drug in India
The drug was first approved by the Food and Drug Administration in
2017 for post-menopausal women with advanced breast cancer, and then in
2018 for younger women. Since then, several private hospitals are
already advising the drug to a few patients.
“Private hospitals may be using it, but the drug is not available at
any government hospital. If any patient opts for the treatment, they
have to purchase it from outside. We have been using it on and off, but
this is an extensive study confirming the positive results of the
combination therapy. In the past, there have been several small-scale
studies,” said Dr S V S Deo, Professor and Head of the Department of
Surgical Oncology, AIIMS.
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